People in general don’t care about what you want to be. They simply walk through life and perceive things they don’t perceive you or your brand in a certain way, because they’re being difficult, they’re doing it because they’re humans and that’s what people do just like people make impressions on other people, so do companies.
It’s very tempting to try to be everything to everyone. You might make some sales in the short run by doing that, but in the long run you sacrifice the impression your brand makes on the collective consciousness of your potential customer base, but don’t panic just yet? There are things you can do to plant the seeds for how you want an audience to perceive your brand. That’s where brands messaging comes in by the end of this lecture, you should be able to demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of these two things.
The deeper understanding of what branding is all about and an understanding of how branding is the foundation for all commercial communication and marketing activity. In the second part, to this procession to lecture, we spent a significant amount of time covering the seven attributes that make a story and the six levels of meaning storytelling elements and levels of meaning have a direct impact on this lecture.
One of the first areas they have a direct correlation Jew is brand messaging continuity. Your brand messaging has to be congruent, in other words, the character of your brand, the personality of your brand, the protagonist, the bridge, the resolution, the attributes, the benefits, the value and the culture has to be consistent. In other words, these elements and levels of meaning have to have consistency without consistency, we saw the seeds of confusion in an audience’s mind and risk a negative impression of a brand brand message.
Consistency is an alignment of three factors who you are, who you say. You are and who an audience thinks you are in audiences, quite good at spotting gaps. So what’s an audience gap when companies say there’s something but act in a radically different way, for instance, a green company that gets caught illegally dumping waste. An example of this would be the Royal Caribbean cruise liner company, which got caught illegally dumping waste oil and hazardous chemicals in bays and along coastlines, in other words, an environment, environmentally sensitive and, in some cases protected areas.
Another example would be a reliable car model. That’s actually dangerous. The Toyota and General Motors scandals are classic examples of this. A last example would be a fair trade or ethical company that uses sweatshop labor. For instance, in 2007 the gap clothing company was caught using cheap child labor in India, which not only severely damaged the credibility of its ethical image. It prompted a fall in its stock market share price.
Your brand doesn’t even have to directly contradict it’s brown message to fall, afoul of your brand message itself and an audience’s perception of your brand. For instance, Walmart fell foul of public opinion when it was discovered that one of its suppliers use child labor and the manufacturing of goods for Walmart. In this instance, it was a Walmart. He used the child labor in the manufacturing of goods.
It was a supplier who provided goods to walmart. Nevertheless, Walmart’s reputation took a big hit, so it should come as no surprise that an audience perception gap can be incredibly harmful, make the relationship between who you are, who you say you are and how people perceive you as aligned and focused as possible. That’s what we mean by being brand congruent. We spent a little bit of time already talking about, what’s called the marketing mix and that’s where this particular slide comes into play all along the brand communication process, from concept to pitching marketing, to PR to social media.
To actually publishing contents, your message must be the same, or, to put it another way, the challenge that you’ll face is the perception that people will have of your brand. At the end of the day, perception is reality. One of the main things that we’re task but doing is to create the best perception through our brand messages, and by this I mean you want to do everything you can to create the best impression possible.
The seven storytelling elements and the six levels of meaning, in addition to continuity, will deliver your message about your brand’s values and its benefits this alongside ensuring there are no gaps, and your audience’s perception of your brand goes a long way towards creating the best possible impression. So, whenever the public hears your name or sees your product or sees your logo, they get a great image in their head and they create a great Association.
We try to create the best possible impression and branding just like we do in any facet of life to build credibility and Trust which are the building blocks to building relationships, and today it’s all about building relationships with the public. Failure to connect with your audience leads to well failure we’re faced with some pretty big challenges. We operate in a time of exchangeable products, the rise of social media, clutter, immature and rather brand skeptic audiences.
So for us, it’s all about finding new ways to get people engaged again in products, services and businesses, as well as advertising in a course in brands. This is a subject that will that the short article in the next slide will actually cover. It underlines the importance of why there’s been really annoying by this messages, but why they just don’t work and why strategic branded stories actually do.
Oh, Oh ha. Oh, Oh, integrated, brand communications for ibc for short, is a holistic communication strategy that integrates all of your audience. Contact activities to manage your most precious asset, your brand IBC integrates activities such as public relations, advertising Investor Relations, interactive media, social media reputation, management or internal communications. To manage a brand, it is central to the idea of managing a brand to optimize its value and communicate its benefits.
The next section of this lecture will go into how to approach and develop an IBC for now. Let me give you an overview. The starting place for any integrated brand communications is the business, not marketing or communications. More specifically, IBC starts with your business strategy, will be going into business strategy and a lot more depth in the brand management sessions. For now, you just need to be aware that I BC begins and ends with understanding the role of a brand within the businesses or organizations business model and determining how our brands can help grow and sustain that business or service.
However, this first means that we must view a brand as a financial asset and identify the key drivers of a brand’s value so that we can influence, control and measure these values through an integrated communications effort. Ibc brings strategy, finance and marketing communications together to manage the brand to optimize its value. It serves as a catalyst for uniting executive, financial and marketing management.
An ultimate ultimately helps to remove internal barriers that may have prevented an integrated communications effort. The first step in this process is start with understanding the role of brand in your business. We spend some time in the first two lectures discussing how brand is defined as a relationship that secures future earnings by developing means and a relationship with an audience. Given this, the starting point for any IBC program involves analyzing the role that brand plays or can play and securing greater loyalty across your business.
This step involves challenging long-held assumptions regarding the key drivers of any business. These assumptions can be beliefs like price is our only added value or ours is simply a commodity business or we can’t alienate our distribution partners or even or our brand plays no role. It’s just all about customer relationships. You get the general idea. The people responsible for brands need to re-examine these assumptions in the light of what is possible rather than what’s always been in the end, your brand can be your trump card, it can be your ace, king or queen.
It can also be a joker and we’re working together to help you avoid that. The second step is understand. The factors that contribute to brand value brand value, which is also referred to as brand equity, is a set of brand assets and liabilities linked to a brand’s name, symbol, experiences, perceptions and all of the other ephemera we’ve already covered, basically those things which either add to Or subtract from the perceived value provided by a product or a service understanding the assets which make up your brand.
Those seven storytelling elements in the six levels of meaning will better enable you to understand the value of your brand. You can actually measure aspects of your brand’s value through things like social media. You know things like likes and comments and shares. You can also measure it through a process called analytics things like how many unique visitors does your website or your blog get every day? Where do most of those visitors come from? How long do they stay on your website or blog all those sorts of questions? We’ve created an entire SME smu unit, all based on analytics what it is and how to do it? It’s basically that important a subject, but for now just know that there are ways and ways and means to measure your brand’s value and then, of course, there’s the most obvious value measure of a brand sales and profit.
So, once more step, two is to understand the factors that contribute to your brand’s value. The third step in this process is identify your key target audience. This is something we’ll be delving into far more deeply in such an eight once the rule of brand has been explored. The next critical step is to identify your key target audiences to prioritize this effort, it’s necessary to distinguish between targets that drive the success of the business and targets that simply contribute to it or influence its success.
In some cases, if you successfully influence your driving audience, the resulting business performance will be strong enough to motivate your contributing audiences to take notice and to respond, in other words, there’s two kind of people, their leaders and their followers. Who are the trendsetters in opinion formers in your industry? You are the most likely to be the first to engage with your new product or your new service.
These are the people you need to specifically address to begin with. Let them advocate your brand and convince those who trust their opinion to engage. The primary challenge is to design a brand strategy that connects with your driving audiences and an integrated Bryan communications plan to connect with your contributing audiences as kind of important. So I’m going to repeat that one again, the primary challenge is to design a brand strategy that connects with your driving audiences.
Those are the opinion formers and the thought, leaders within your sector or your industry, and an integrated brand communications plan to connect with your contributing audiences. Those are basically the people who listen to and follow the advice of opinion formers and thought leaders step. Four is all about framing your big idea. Big Ideas define a bronze, unique value; propositions, communicating sameness, it’s just a waste of valuable resources, communicating meaningful distinctiveness as a catalyst for growth.
Big Ideas stem from a clear understanding of an audience’s needs marketplace dynamics and your business strategies. Big Ideas match your brand’s unique benefits with the needs of your driving audience. Step 5 is assessing your big idea. Great big ideas satisfy four fundamental criteria. First criteria is relevant and by that I mean be relevant and connecting with an audience’s needs. Remember your central pop proposition, your character and your protagonist.
This is where they can come into play. The second criteria is differentiated by that I mean being differentiated and stand apart from competitive propositions. Remember things like your antagonist, your bridge and your resolution. Next, your big idea has to be credible in its believability and something that often gets overlooked. Your big any idea it needs to have stretch it needs to have the ability to stretch and grow with your business as it evolves relevance.
Difference and credibility are the three things you must continually assess and ensure each accurately reflect your brand relevant difference and credibility are the three things you must continually assess. You also have to ensure that each accurately reflects your brand. The sixth step is actually understanding how far you need to shift perceptions in order to own your big idea as they develop a loyal relationship with the brand audiences move, through almost a process of progressive involvement, with little to minimal kind of touch points in the beginning.
To actually becoming quite actively involved with your brand’s later on during that process, perceptions may develop that could hinder an audience’s ability to respond to your distinctive promise. These perception barriers must be overcome to convey your big idea. Some barriers are more difficult to surmount than others. If your barriers are awareness related and chances are, if you’re new to the market, that’s going to be your challenge.
Actually getting people aware that your brand even exists. If your barriers are actually awareness related, greater exposure to your message may be, all that’s actually need it to fix the problem. However, you, if you face questions about your credibility, you must actually change the way your audience thinks about your value. So here’s some common perception barriers that brands have faced. The first example is through a previous experience with the brand that was less than a quality experience.
This negative experience builds mistrust and closes an audience love to any new messages that you send. The second kind of barrier is a perception barrier. A company that purports to be a green company will attract a green, conscious audience if it’s found to not have green practices. This will undermine if not destroy the perception of that brand. Another kind of perception barrier is when something that’s branded as easy to do.
We’re easy to assemble is perceived to be difficult. A more subtle perception barrier happens if a brand’s message doesn’t convey conviction or if a bronze tone of voice doesn’t match the actual brand image. For instance, if I’m marketing a children’s book and aimed at nine to 11 year olds, but the branding language I use, is worthy of a PhD student, that’s not really going to instill a positive Association for the book cultural differences.
Now this is a big one. One of the most famous cases of this is when Chevrolet won’t de Nova in Latin America, nova or more accurately. No vah translates as no go in Spanish, not exactly the kind of message you want to send about a car. The seventh step in the ibc process is to build your message to shift perceptions, getting people to change the way they think about. Your brand is no easy task. It requires a communication effort that is capable of penetrating the formidable walls.
People erect as a protection against deadly information overload to make them take notice. You must deliver precisely targeted messages that rises above the clutter and compels them to alter their assumptions. This is more or less with that article. A few slides earlier actually addressed a compelling message that delivers a powerful big idea can generate communication success even with the most modest media budgets make sure the messages are right again.
This is a direct link to the lectures and lesson sessions too. Okay, there’s not many steps left the eighth step and the IPC process is to understand the role that each communication tool you use, helps to create and shift perceptions and can ultimately sustain your brand’s momentum. Once you have your strategic brand message, you have to pick the most appropriate delivery vehicle, the rest of the SMU course units.
They address different aspects of these delivery mediums things like from blogging to social media, to websites and, more as a general rule. Each progressive stage of your involvement with an audience requires more individualized communications to meet the needs of your audience again. Think about tribes and think about the example I use with aardvark records about the different tribes we communicated with and how it used a different mix of personality traits and approaches targeted to very specific tribes within an overall audience.
Social media, advertising and PR are powerful awareness building tools, they’re also helpful and instilling a sense of relevance. High touch, media things like print advertising, interactive media and adverts, they’re better for relevance and instilling a clear sense of differential value, direct interactions, things again like social media. Well, those are the most effective tools for shaping satisfaction and encouraging audience loyalty.
The challenge is to leverage the relative power if each medium to build an integrated solution that will work the best for your unique audience communication requirements. The ninth step is to measure your results. I’ve covered this a few slides back when I mentioned analytics among the other purposes of analytics. This will allow you to define a return on your investment in terms of time and if budgets actually allow money – and here we go we’re at the last step.
The last step and the ibc process is to revisit step 5, which is all about shifting perceptions and repeat the whole process. Over and over again, ibc is not a one-time, only thing it’s a process and it’s a process that requires fine-tuning tweaking and changing. This is because Browns don’t exist in some sort of time, vacuum external and internal forces, but they basically require that we continually revisit the process.
Ibc is also an organic process, one that can be fed, nurtured and made stronger through active involvement once you’ve measured. Your initial results returned to the program’s foundations and examine opportunities for enhancement, return to your messages and explore opportunities to make them even more compelling return to your media assumptions and determine, if you’re, reaching your targets. Other things you can do return to your your budgets and determine if you’ve, if you’ve allocated them as effectively as possible and finally return to your assessment tools and determine whether they’re generating the insight you need to grow and manage your branding program.
Okay. So it’s time to start wrapping things up for this lecture. Let’s look at what brand messaging isn’t the old marketing paradigm is dead, and by that I mean the old weight the old-fashioned way of marketing. It was one-way communication from some unknown, faceless entity to the public. It was one-to-one communication, was a very top-down approach and evolved. Huge huge budgets just enormous enormously big spend because of this, because it’s one-way communication.
It was a top-down approach, basically messages coming down from on high down to consumers and customers, who you know they. We really weren’t asked for it to have any kind of involvement or feedback the companies that did that was perceived to be kind of faceless corporate brands. Companies who engage in this style of marketing or typically and usually perceived to be ignoring their social responsibilities and they’re.
Also perceived to be quite arrogant, okay, so now that we’ve taken a look at what brands messaging, isn’t we’re going to take a look at what brand messaging actually is the new marketing paradigm is it’s about building relationships with an audience. It’s about one-to-many communication. It’s about two-way loyalty and respect. It’s also about honesty. Even if that honesty hurts it’s about communicating values, two-way dialogue, again, those are all important considerations in terms of building a community, especially community, around your brand.
It’s not only allowing but actively encouraging your audience’s commentary about your you and your brand, and it’s also a two-way growth process. Some of the best most innovative ideas that we actually had an aardvark actually came about through actively engaging with their audience listening to what they had to say and hearing their suggestions in their feedback branding. It’s about people, it’s about community, it’s about participation, it’s the shift from monologue to dialogue, and it has changed traditional media and marketing forever.
Okay, so I’ve been banding this term community about a little in our previous sessions together. It’s a term that I appreciate people can interpret differently. So what exactly do I mean when I say community? For me the three core components? The first component is a group having a shared consciousness, and by that I mean members, feel they kind of sort of knew. Each other, or they knew something about each other because they have a shared interest.
So an example of this would be people who drive Broncos, who else drives Broncos? Well guys like me and guys who like engines, and it could be that simple. The second component are rituals and traditions, and by this I mean the way in which the meaning of a community is reproduced within that group, and I know that’s a bit abstract, so i’m going to give you an example. An example of this would be people who drive sobs and my experience.
They are so passionate about their car. They really are sab acolytes, so an example would be. If you drew, you know, if you drove a saab, whenever you pass anyone else driving a slob, you either beep your horn or flash your lights you’re, giving an indication to kind of thumbs up you’re in the Saab club. The third component is a sense of moral responsibility, and by that I mean as a sense of duty to the community as a whole and then example of this would be.
We see another sob on the road we pull over and we help no matter what it is. It’s that really kind of deep connection. The last part of this wrap up is to highlight some of the most common brand messaging mistakes. First mistake: not speaking to audience values too often marketers create messaging around what they believe are the most important features of their product or the service. Instead of looking into what’s actually important to their audience.
Take the time to understand your audience and their values then align it to your messaging. Accordingly, one way to get insight into your audience’s values is to ask them to complete a short online survey using something like survey monkey. For instance, a small online design store that features. Recycle furniture might use an online survey to compare what customers to compare customers values. For example, the store may find out that will cost is important to its audience.
Family and safety are the two things their audience. Power actually values the most. The company can then shift its messaging from lowest cost to family-friendly furniture on a budget. The second mistake relying too heavily on buzzwords. Everyone wants to be part of a major trend, whether it’s being a big data company, a slow food, restaurant or a mom preneur. The problem with relying on these buzzwords to define you is that the more popular they become, the less impact they have people begin to just simply change these kind of buzz.
Where it’s out this doesn’t mean you can’t use popular category phrases, just use them sparingly and pair them with words that differentiate you and pack a unique punch, for example, natural skin care company. True kid does a great job of using the term sustainable in its company messaging, and it does it in a really subtle way that feels quite authentic. For instance, true kidner choose kids through their daily through their daily play and is paving the way to innovative sustainable body and hair care for the whole family, from babies to big kids.
Third mistake: failing to make your messages portable many companies rely on word-of-mouth to drive their business. Is your messaging portable enough for these customers to easily spread? The word one way to check is to try boiling your messaging down to just one or two sentences. Creating the same type of logline Hollywood users, to sum up a movie or TV plot, and by logline I mean there’s kind of strapped lines that we hear a young man or woman from different social classes fall in love aboard an ill-fated voyage at sea.
If you can’t tell your story and 50 words or less chances, are your audience won’t be able to either your log lines? You give people an idea of what you offer and provide some sort of hook to stimulate interest, for example, a boutique PR agency that specializes in launching hot emerging tech companies. Another one could be an accounting firm that deals exclusively with small business. Audio audits, once you’ve got your logline, go back to your marketing copy and make sure these these simple messages come through loud and clear.
You can also use the logline itself in your marketing materials. Remember the aardvark one! We listen and we learn another one was music. Unlimited simple memorable catching: you can also use these kind of log lines on your website and your social media properties and in conversations with your audience, both old and new. The fourth mistake is actually forgetting to excite. You know that sensation of arriving home after a short drive and not remembering any details of the actual journey, much of our life is spent in this kind of autopilot mode making decisions based on our habits, emotions and gut instincts.
It’s up to you to wake people up and to inspire them with your messaging, so infuse your language with as much excitement and energy as possible and use action verbs rather than a passive tone of voice. Here’s a great example of action orientated messaging from cleaning cleaning product company method, it’s time to clean, happy with biodegradable products that clean, like hack, smell like heaven and leave nothing nasty in their wake.
The final mistake is messaging by committee. When you fill a conference room with senior managers for a managing session, it’s not unusual for everyone to have a different opinion about what the company does accompanied by a strong need to be heard. The problem with this approach is that it often results in statements like this one. Our mission is to help innovative leaders in the CPG industry, increase the velocity of their business and drive engagement with their suit with their social communities to inspire meaningful change, yeah.
What the heck does that even mean this mission statement is likely suffering from something we call whiteboard Ida’s the inflammation that occurs when someone crimes everything from a whiteboard into one sentence. It may also have a case of groupthink in which fresh concepts surfaced by the team gets boiled down into familiar jargon. Out of the need for consult consensus, compare the clunky mission statement above to this simple powerful example from bristol-myers squibb, whose mission it is to, and I quote, to discover, develop and deliver innovative medicines that help patients prevail for serious diseases.
Your messaging shouldn’t sound like it was fused together in dr. Frankenstein’s lab, while it’s valuable to get multiple opinions, don’t fall into the trap of trying to please everyone in the room. Stay true to your audience’s values, be authentic and communicate in straightforward terms. All the best for your work on the scenario and the template that accompanies this session and I’ll see you again in session for
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