A brand is the complete package of the customer experience: from the logo identity package, signage, collateral and messaging that present the organization’s image to the collection of encounters that customers experience with your people, locations (whether virtual or real-life brick and mortar), processes and products (or services.) ALL of that is encompassed in your brand, and hopefully it is communicated consistently, persistently and with great clarity.
Before you can effectively communicate about your organization, you have to find the authentic descriptors about the culture, philosophy and approach that are unique to your organization. This process often works in alignment with, or sometimes even creates, the mission, vision and values of an organization, and uses those to communicate expected behaviors that drive those to employees. Often, the process of articulating those characteristics helps to drive the process of defining your brand attributes.
Authentically identifying brand attributes isn’t easy work. The attributes really have to be on point with the behaviors and experiences that stakeholders have with your organization. For instance, it isn’t authentic to market your organization as bold and innovative if what employees and customers experience is slow, plodding and ordinary.
In addition, creating and marketing authentic brands and messages requires a specific order of communication that is really important. Years ago, I created what I call the “concentric model of communication,” which says, in essence, start with your employees so they can be effective brand ambassadors. This ensures that you don’t waste precious marketing resources creating a customer boomerang when they answer your call to action only to find out that employees don’t actually know enough about it to sell it or help customers act on it. Uninformed employees kill marketing strategies, and it’s a shame because that can not only be avoided, but also reversed by informing them first and using them as the front line in sharing the messages — leveraging marketing reach.
From the employee audience, you then communicate with board members and investors (or donors for nonprofits), working your way out of the circle to the last audience. That last audience is media (social and traditional) to reach the general public at a mass message level. Through each layer of this process, savvy marketers are using both mass messages and targeted messages specific to a particular stakeholder group.
In addition to the order of audiences, I advise clients that they need to have a paradigm shift in the approaches used to communicate about their brands and organizations.
Following the lead of Simon Sinek’s book “Start With Why,” I advocate that clients should start with communicating the WHY of their organizations.
Usually, when we meet people and in our general communications about the organization, we immediately talk about WHAT our organization does: “As a healthcare foundation, we are a funder that raises money and makes grants to direct healthcare service providers.”
However, we need to reframe our thinking about messaging and instead start with WHY our organization matters from the lens of the listener, explaining why people should care that we even exist: “As a healthcare foundation, we make sure people have access to important health services because if you don’t have your health, nothing else really matters.”
From the conversation about WHY, we can then move to the conversation of HOW we are unique, how we execute with our values and how our product or service delivers something important and necessary.
Then, and only then, should we move to the WHAT. At that point, we communicate what we do.
This takes a bit of time and practice to hone down the specific language, and that is a critical part of branding. Defining and sharing the descriptive language we want employees, board members, investors and other stakeholders to use when discussing us or writing about us is an important part of the branding and marketing effort.
Another vital part of communicating about the brand is separating the mass messages to all audiences from the segmented messages to specific stakeholders. In our example about a healthcare foundation, the WHY mass messages could be “without health, nothing else really matters” or “everyone deserves access to quality health.”
There are a variety of ways to segment audiences and their messages along with the mass messages. They might look something like this:
- By type: people who only want to attend events, people who engage with the issues or people who react to the general education (statistics)
- By hot-button issue: access to care, mental health or early childhood development
- By call to action: volunteer, give, share our message or connect with us to make a difference so everyone has access to care and quality life
Using an animal shelter as another example, you could assume the WHY mass messages would be about the why — “caring for animals who need assistance” or “animals provide important benefits to people and communities.” However, the segmentation messages target various stakeholders according to the elements they care about more specifically, such as:
- By type of animal lover: dogs, cats or birds
- By hot-button issue: spaying and neutering, behavior training, shelters or strays
- By call to action: volunteer, give, foster an animal or share our message so all animals have safe homes
Getting to your WHY can provide an opportunity to engage stakeholders in telling their stories about why they connected with you and why they stay connected with you. Using the getting to WHY approach gives marketing professionals the opportunity to communicate the brand authentically, creating a more relevant message. Relevancy is the key to message retention, which then drives reactions.
Communicating brands authentically takes diligence and perseverance, but when done well, it is clearly identified and lasting.
Tip List For Communicating Your Brand Authentically:
1) BE CLEAR ON THE PURPOSE
OF YOUR MESSAGE
- Inform – messages, repetition
of messages - Engage – start conversations; tell a story and get feedback from audiences
- Influence/Persuade – create a call to action; get audiences to DO something NOW (buy, advocate, share, etc.)
2) TIPS FOR GETTING TO YOUR WHY
Ask good questions of everyone and video their answers!
- Customer testimonials about why your product or service makes a difference — why are they raving fans of your organization?
- Employee testimonials about why they love working for your organization and why you are important to the community and to customers
- Community advocates who talk about why your organization makes a difference for the area
- Ask: “Why are we important?” “Why does what we do matter to xyz audience?”
- Remember to ask your vendors why you are different from other similar organizations
3) REMEMBER THE ORDER OF COMMUNICATIONS
- Start with those closest to the organization and then work outward to other stakeholder groups
4) AUTHENTICITY IS THE KEY
- Communicate only what your brand experience can deliver
5) CONSISTENCY MATTERS
- Use the same exact language every time — and give it to your stakeholders to use as talking points, too
6) SEGMENT AUDIENCES TO TARGET MESSAGES EFFECTIVELY
- Be sure to evaluate and segment audiences when possible to target your messages and create more personalized experiences
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Debbie Mason is a consultant who provides executive and organizational development, strategic planning and governance consulting for organizations. Her firm uses a number of assessments, coaching and training tools to achieve individual executive and collective team growth.