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Branding Story Attributes and Elements – Session 2 Lecture 2: SMU101: Intro to Branding Unit

We need to familiarize ourselves with what these are and then relate them to the branding stories that we tell so some of these conventions are first a central premise. The central premise is the whole point of telling a story in the first place. Basic story, premises are things like power corrupts or bad people can be turned good or saving the world is worth the effort or even love.

Conquers everything premises tend to be easily identifiable universal human themes. A clean premise is when it’s easy to say what a story is about in just a few sentences when it comes to branding the premise, will always be an aspect of a brand’s promise or value without a premise, a story just doesn’t have a point. The second convention – strong three-dimensional characters after the premise has been nailed down the story.

Development process moves to developing strong, engaging and believable characters who an audience will come to care about in even Route 4 and branding a character can be a little character that you develop to represent the brand think about things like the Pillsbury Doughboy Ronald McDonald. The compare the market meerkats, the Green Giant, the Michelin Man in the PG, tipps monkey or a character can be a brand’s personality.

The cheekiness of John Smith lager the irreverence of tango, the elegance of Jaguar, the integrity of the body shop or the no-nonsense nacinda pendant newspaper. A third convention is something that I call the confined space and few things are as confined as a hundred and forty characters of a tweet or the standard. Five hundred to a thousand words of a blog post or sheet of a4 for a press release or three to five minutes of a YouTube article for a story to have a chance of making a point and has to eliminate all extraneous details.

Focus on one points and a character or a group of characters who has a good reason for existing a story that wanders around is aimless or unfolds into a series of unrelated circumstances will only confuse an audience with useless details. The fourth storytelling convention is having a protagonist. Traditionally in storytelling, a protagonist is someone who is on some sort of a quest or undergoes a transformation.

The role of the protagonist is to carry the audience through the story, which is why this is the most important character. The protagonist sees more clearly understands things sooner, makes the good guesses more often and takes the right path when everyone else says he’s crazy. Harrison Ford has made a career out of playing protagonists characters we or other characters initially may not like, but who ultimately changes for the better han Solo.

Decker from the Blade Runner Indiana Jones are all classic protagonists. Brending doesn’t have this kind of protagonist and branding the protagonist. Is the problem the need the requirement or want that your brand promises to solve for satisfy a brand protagonist in this light can either be explicitly or implicitly stated if Brent X wants to convey the convenience of international banking having branches all around the globe? I’m stressing this too globe-trotting explorers a business people, the inconvenience of not having such a bank is usually an explicitly stated protagonist.

Most service companies explicitly state the protagonist in their stories. Luxury beauty and fashion brands typically use an implicitly state. A protagonist Brand X will make you feel youthful what’s implicit is that its audience feels insecure about their gray, hairs or wrinkles or weight or whatever it is? They feel insecure about that and security is the implicitly stated protagonist. Think of these as the elephant in the room that no one wants to actually say is there.

Another story convention is called an antagonist. An antagonist is someone bent on stopping the hero or the protagonist of a story. Your antagonist s, –, are your main competitors. Few brands actually name their rivals in their stories. However, they’re usually clever clues in clues about their identity at aardvark. Our antagonist, unsurprisingly, were major labels. All we had to say was we listen and we learn and our audience knew exactly who we were talking about and how we were different.

Another story convention is called an arch. An arch is like a bridge. It gets you from point A to point B. Your story is about fulfilling a need or a problem or a desire. If your brand satisfies a problem, the arch is a person going from having a problem to understanding that your brand will solve that problem. If your brand is fashion-related, for instance, the arch is going from not knowing what to wear to the office party to seeing that dress, causing a stir.

Another arch is someone who is bored of all their article games in thinking that your article game is just what they need to relieve their boredom. Every story needs an arch. Another convention is conflict. Typically, a story needs conflict for branding. I say a story needs resolution. If the arch is the bridge resolution is the final destination, it’s the engagement with the brand, whether that engagement is a purchase or acquisition of certain services.

Well, this isn’t a story element. It’s the outcome. A branding story always aims for as a set of conventions. Each one of these seven has its role to play in conveying relevance and uniqueness to a brand story’s audience. So, to recap: the story is comprised of seven elements: a central premise, a three-dimensional character, a confined space, a protagonist and antagonist an arch and resolution. We will be exploring these in this lecture, as well as the following lectures within this unit.

Keeping these seven elements in mind in this lecture, we will be exploring two critical aspects of storytelling, developing an understanding of why storytelling establishes audience, connections and developing an understanding of strategic storytelling element. In addition to seven storytelling elements, strategic brand stories conveys six levels of meaning and I’ll briefly introduce what these are now.

The first is the attributes of a brand, in other words, what it is that makes a brand different and unique. The second level of meaning is the benefits of a brand. The third is a brand’s values. The fourth is a brand culture. For instance, a pehoe Apple has a culture about innovation. Jaguar has a culture of luxury and elegance Minnie’s ministry of sound has a culture of fun and hedonism. The fifth is the personality of a brand in the 6th level of meaning is understanding its audience through tone of voice vocabulary.

Images, music – in other words, all of the things that a brand story uses to convey, meaning. So, let’s spend some time exploring brand attributes brand attributes address specific aspects of a brand. In other words, they signify the basic nature of a brand. They are a bundle of features that highlight the physical and personality aspects of a brand attributes are developed through images, actions or presumptions.

They are a collection of characteristics, personality elements and associations that make a brand uniquely yours boiled-down. It’s what you bring to the table that no one else can attributes convey. Uniqueness attributes, convey uniqueness and distinctiveness. Attributes can also convey a brand’s value and its promise understanding your brand’s attributes helps you define the confined space. Your story must work with them.

You can think of this element as a filter filtering out everything that is extraneous to your brand story. To keep it on point. You can also think of it as a boundary or a frame for a conversation. Keeping your basic story focused and concise within a brown story. Attributes will always be the central premise. Specific attributes can also be the three-dimensional character, or sometimes even the protagonist, which one it is will depend on the story you want to tell and that story’s point the attribute you wish to tell a story about may also influence how you want to tell that story.

In other words, determine whether you’re confined space will be a short article, a blog post, a press release an image, a some of the form of communication. With your audience, understanding your brand’s, unique combination of attributes helps you establish it convey the following things: you are different. The clarity of the message you want to deliver to your brand story, the perception and audience has of your brand.

This perception should be heightened and strengthened, strengthened by every brand story. You tell or brand experience that you share two-way loyalty. Your end of the bargain is not wasting your audience’s time. Each and every story you tell or experience you share has to be meaningful and relevant to your audience. Your loyalty to your audience should, in the medium to long term, result in your audience being loyal to your brand.

To illustrate the point about Brown difference on the screen or two very popular brands, of coffee, keeping the concept of difference in mind. They are at the end of the day, both just cups of coffee and your opinion. What makes one different from the other, what Association do you have for each one of them think about the brand messages and their advertising, which one do you listen to and why? How does the branding messages for each influenced you do they do their messages influence? You spend a little bit of time thinking about this pause, the article here, if you want to spend a few minutes just thinking about these, your answers to these questions you’ll be answering similar questions these in the scenario and the template exercises that accompany this session brand Benefits are about what it is.

Your brand does if a brand exists to solve a problem than how exactly does it solve that problem in a way that no other brands can if it exists, to fill a void or a need or desire, then how does it fill this in a way that A similar brand can’t what positive experience action or outcome can your brand provide. This is another aspect that relates to the central premise, part of the story. It is also the arch that leads to a resolution.

Brand values explain how you can prove what you can do and why you can do it better than your competitors without a unique value proposition. Your brand lacks focus and leaves an audience confused. The more value that your Brown brings to the market into an audience. The stronger your brand can be. This needs to be something beyond a profit motive. Why are you passionate about what it is that you do? Brand values relates to the protagonist element of your storytelling.

Remember in branding the protagonist is the problem the needs requirement or want that your brand promises to solve or satisfying solving or fulfilling is its function and its value to get to the root of your brand’s value. Ask yourself these following questions: who are we? What do we stand for? What do we do for our audience? How does our audience see our brand and what do they think it stands for now enter your story’s protagonist who solely exists to answer just these questions, the central premise of your story solely exists to allow the protagonist to answer a specific question.

The penny has probably started to drop why this approach is more powerful, more effective than merely bombarding people with just the standard by this message and why we’re spending so much time in the first in this first lecture for this session, covering story to storytelling, hopefully, you’ve Begun to see the relevance between the seven storytelling conventions brand attributes and how strategically produced brand stories can use these to create associations about a brand that links to memory.

If not, don’t worry this, this is a theme that will be developing far more fully over the next couple of slides. So what is this thing? We call brand culture. Let me spend a little time answering that by outlining what creating a brand culture actually accomplishes, a brand culture creates a sense of community with this audience. It’s the shared aspect of storytelling and all of the elements that go with that story.

Each element speaks about your brand’s: they create associations that should mean something and stand for something. It’s the act of sharing, whether it’s experiences, knowledge time, advice, ideals, beliefs or things. All of this creates a culture or an environment. A brand culture creates an experience with its audience. It’s actually audience focused. It develops a sense of empathy. A brand lets its audience know that it understands what it is they want need or requires.

A brand culture also defines your brand’s ethos. It is the proof that you walk the talk. It’s the proof that your motivation isn’t all about the money that there is a genuine passion on your part for doing whatever it is that you do this aspect links to your stories, central premise. It can also be your story’s protagonist and also its character, which one will again depend on the story that you want to tell and the reason why you want to tell it okay, so what’s brand personality, all about then Brown personality is it’s a set of human Characteristics and attributes that are attributed to a brand name, it’s something to which an audience can relate to you at an emotional level, and this is the added value that our brand gains, apart from its functional benefits.

Think again, back to that Dyson example that I gave just like any other Hoover, but when you really start drilling down into it, it’s all about the lifestyle and actually not just owning a Dyson but having a Dyson home brand personality is a hundred percent about the Three-Dimensional character aspect of your storytelling: this is something we’ll be discussing in greater detail over the next few slides.

Why is having a brand personality? Important? It’s about establishing a perceptive difference in uniqueness, using personality archetypes gives your brand to personality and a story that everyone can understand and relate to both internally and externally to your business or your service. Art fork records personality was kind of like the older, older brother or sister. You want it to be when you group, when you grew older or a cool, older, cousin or a hip uncle most families have one of these.

Their tastes are a bit ahead of the times, but they’re unquestioned when they speak. Everyone listens to what they have to say. They don’t follow trends, they make the trends they had, that undefinable and unquantifiable it or x-factor, and yet they remain very grounded and very down to earth. They’re, not arrogance, which kind of makes them even cooler. They also like to share. It was the right character for the company and one that worked and still works incredibly well, once established, it was a brand personality that worked across cultures and geographies that cool family member personality is universal.

Considering the majority of record labels, don’t even have a brand personality. The fact that aardvark had won much last one that worked well, may the label stand out in a very positive way even more. It was no accident that the label attracts the audience that it does. We were very clear about who we were as a brand. What we had to offer and why we were passionate about the business that we were in our brand stories in character clearly delivered the message.

There are five basic dimensions of brand personality which you can see here on the screen, and I apologize again. This is part of the reason why I split this overall lecture into two halves. I’m heating you with rather a lot in this one so between you know, seven but storytelling elements, six levels of meaning, and now we have five personality dimensions in the table. You’ll see a dimension name like sincerity and the traits that are most often associated with that dimension.

In the case of sincerity, the traits most often associated with sincerity are dermis, disa, t, honesty, genuineness and cheerfulness. This is an area that has undergone extensive research for decades. Hence the identified traits associated associated with each one of these five dimensions. You are quite literally looking at the results of hundreds of millions of pounds worth of marketing research.

While this money and interest spent on brand personality, people make purchasing decisions based on any number of associations, they have with an individual brand and companies spend millions on advertising and marketing activities so that they can influence what those associations might be. Just as we each choose. Our friends, based on their personalities, brands, can elicit the same sort of response and consumers understanding your brand’s personality will transform how you approach an audience.

It’s also one of the fundamental foundations of creating a branding community. Let’s look at the first dimension sincerity. Consumers interpret sincere brands, is being down-to-earth, honest, wholesome and cheerful so using, I don’t know julia roberts as an example of a actor or actress brown, but the house sincerity associated with it sure some people will find julia roberts annoying, but most people find her endearing.

The kind of woman you could sit down with for a chinwag at the kitchen table next up is excitement. The most exciting brands are daring, spirited, imaginative and on the cutting edge of things not only are Burton Snowboards on the cutting edge of technology and performance. The products bearing the burden names are designed with their audience and minds, funky, graphics and for thinking designs make Burton a leader in their competitive industry.

Next up is competence, reliability, intelligence and success are the traits best associated with brands associated with competence. Even in these trying economic times, there are a few financial service firms that still manage to play well in in an audience’s mind, Ernst & Young is the stable, successful smart guy next door. Who can tell you how to transform your business? Sorry for the sirens? It’s just proven to be one of those days really.

Next up we have sophistication a brand that is sophisticated, is viewed as charming and fit for the upper classes. When it comes to esteem, in seemingly eternal longevity, the chanel brand is unequaled in good times and bad. This brand remains strong as a symbol of life lived in all the right places, doing all the right things last we have ruggedness. Interestingly, an audience picks up on this personality dimension quite well.

Rugged brands are seen as outdoors in tough. The North Face has built an empire by outfitting people who actually do Chris carry things outdoors as well as those who just want to look good now. In most cases, a brand only has one dimension. There are others like aardvark, who have more than one and I’ll explain how this works overall, aardvark mixed sincerity with excitement, both of these dimensions captured its brand personality.

Now, where things get a bit, tricky was defining a dimension for aardvarks different audiences aardvark, not only releases albums within staggeringly different music genres. It sells music to the public and to other companies, so taking the first part of that first selling, music to the public. We couldn’t brand our alternative rock releases, the same way that we branded our minimalist electronica releases that it just wouldn’t work.

Alternative rockers, wanted, ruggedness and excitement. Minimalist electronica lovers wanted sincerity and sophistication with the Dasha competence. We reflected each tribes, dimension, preferences and all of our branding messages to each all the while making sure the overall look feel and style were congruent to the overall aardvark brand. In other words, we played with various aspects of the overall brand character and personality and tailored each to every genre of music that we released.

The fun was in developing an overall brand personality and character, an umbrella or master personality, as it were. That could enable us to do all of this. An additional layer of complication was licensing and selling our music Jude’s strategic business partners. Partnership deals with international music download providers, other record labels, other music publishers and people who rented our music for television, film and gaming game production companies was a large part of the overall business and it would have been really inappropriate to send another business.

The same kind of branding stories or have the same kind of branding character as those that we sent to the public when it came to our business partners. Competence was the defining personality dimension with a dash of excitement and sincerity, and if this sounds like having multiple personalities, it kind of is most entertainment. Companies do have multiple faces. We have to it’s all about understanding the wants and needs of the various tribes who make up our overall audience in what’s meaningful and relevant to each one of them.

If you go on to own or handle a company, that only requires one dimension, be very, very thankful and be very, very grateful. The point of the aardvark example is this understanding these characteristics for your brand’s, but, more specifically for your audience, support you in framing your strategic branding, storytelling, okay. So what is brand audience you’ve already done a bit of reading about this and you’ve heard it and wanted to the articles that you viewed already an audience is what we used to refer to as consumers or customers.

An audience is also composed of distinct, individual tribes. What we used to refer to as demographics, traditional marketers, still use the terms, consumers, customers and demographics? I don’t it kind of a lot of the kind of newer generation of marketers. They don’t either. Is that I’m not alone more and more marketing people have begun. Abandoning those old fashioned terms for audience and tribes, so why would we do that terms like consumer customer and demographics, dehumanize people? They turn living people into an abstraction and other that is reduced to use statistics or a percentage point they’re? Not us.

We can do horrible things to them like spamming in direct mail, because we no longer see them as being human. Like us, consumers, customer and demographics, traditional marketers, see them as just the life support systems for wallets purses or checking accounts. That’s all they’re worth audience and tribe’s is an affirmative view. People who think in these terms want to exchange experiences and yes, goods, products and services as well, but what we want to do these things in a more positive way, a way that isn’t reductionist.

We see audiences and tribes as humans they’re, one of us. They have thoughts and feelings and opinions and aspirations, as well as wallets purses and checking accounts. While they may all sound slightly hippie dippie a way to approach this kind of work. The rewards on many different levels makes the effort worth it. Audiences are loyal. Audiences can also advocate on your brand’s behalf numbers and statistics can’t advocate, and they never will before.

Listening to this last part of the lecture, I suggest that you refer back to your notes about the seven elements of a story which, just as a reminder, the central premise: the three-dimensional character, the confined space, the protagonist, the antagonist of the arch and the resolution, and Really understand what each one of these elements are and what they contribute to a story. I’d also suggest revisiting your notes about the six levels of meaning which, just in case you forgotten our brand attributes brand benefits, brand values, brand culture, brand personality and audience understand the relationships in the interactions between the seven story, elements and six levels of meaning.

You will need to relate what you learned in the first half of this lesson to the last bit of brand storytelling that we’re about to cover here. We will be building on that knowledge, which you will need in order to complete this scenario and the template exercises for this session. A good strategic brand story is also measurable. In other words, your brand’s story is the most important statement you can make to ensure it’s as powerful as it can be document your story and ask these three questions.

Number one. Is it relevant by relevant, I mean you can state what you think is important, but the only thing that matters is that it’s important to your audience make sure your language feels like it belongs to them. The second question: is it valuable by valuable I mean, does your brand story deliver real value to the lives of your audience if it isn’t immediately evident, go back and craft the statement, so it delivers the value third question: is it extendable and by extent extendable? I mean: can your brand story extend across your entire? Offering can it grow with you into the future, make sure that your story has enough depth and again think about the example that I gave for that umbrella personality for aardvark? That’s a good example of making something extendable here, I’m going to give you some storytelling secrets: have you ever read a corporate website, that’s so dry and so factual? It nearly puts you to sleep.

Conversely, have you read one of those about us page that was so painstakingly detailed? You know the ones that kind of say it started when I was born in a small town and college. I studied then, 10 years after that project we decided to, and it just goes on and on and on in my new detail, so much so that you’re utterly confused by the second paragraph. Another thing to keep in mind: that’s basically don’t do that.

Keep things nice clean and streamlines another secret. It’s a story! Writing have you accomplished something unimaginable overcome an impossible hardship over joy to find your passion tell your audience about it. These are evergreen ideas and emotions that will always resonate with your audience. It shows you’re genuine and it shows it again beyond a profit motive. You have a real passion for doing the thing that it is that you do challenge yourself to tell your anecdotes in two or three sentences to stay on course.

This is a topic will be going into far far more in depth than the whole kind of writing more effectively online course, but for now just kind of think about how you can put things in a very, very succinct way, some more storytelling secrets if you’re a New customer or new client met you in person. After reading your website, or blog with your, be a big disconnect between that and your real personality, showcase, your personality and unique style by telling your story in your own voice give your audience a glimpse into the kind of person or brand that you are this.

Should this will always show you and demonstrate your passion and the next one stumped on how to embrace your voice on paper risk? Looking like a crazy person and actually say out loud the story, you want to tell online even record it with your smartphone or one of those dictaphones transcribe it and then edit it just to round out the edges and make sure that everything is smooth. If you saw clothing, that’s primarily aimed towards professional twenty-something, women want to think about creating a blog or a blog series, at least that offers fashion advice and tips for dressing well at work or outfits that take you from the desk to drinks.

Afterwards, you get the idea, there’s kind of stories tell the stories your audience want in need to hear another little tip is um devote 30 minutes to getting to know your audience better. What are they reading? What do they comment most on? What are the biggest challenges? Craft blog posts addressing what you’ve learned and in doing so remember the personality dimensions, but also remember the six levels of meaning brand attributes, benefits, values, culture, personality and audience that wraps things up for this lecture.

I wish you all the best for your work on the scenarios in the template that accompany this session, and I will see you in the next session.

 

Categories
Online Marketing

Branding Messaging – Session 3 SMU101: Intro to Branding Unit

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