Your brand is who you are to your audience, your stakeholders and yourself. It is at the heart of what you do, how you do it, and why people should care. Is your message getting through to the people who matter?
Brand Mantra Process
Many organizations working in social change have complex stories to tell about multi-dimensional business products or social change campaign goals. In today's hyper competitive marketing landscape, where the scarcest resource is the attention of your target audience, having a clear and compelling case for support grown directly from the essence of who you are is critical to being heard and moving people to take action.
Brands are about hearts and minds, feelings and emotions. They touch us. They do so because they are associated with values with which we identify. Increasingly, brands are driven by values. Great brands stand for something, something which people believe in and which matters to them." (Thomas Gad, 4-D Branding)
Our Brand Mantra process focuses on the core of what you do, what makes you unique, who your primary target audience is and what they deeply desire from you. Informed by market research, customer data,
and the insight and vision of your internal team, we help you uncover a sustainable brand that resonates from a values perspective along four holistic dimensions: functional, social, personal and spiritual.
The end result is a one page document that outlines the long-term brand architecture for your organization, ensuring your messages are on target and communicated with creativity, consistency, and clarity. This Mantra creates intense internal alignment around the most compelling ideas behind your organization and will guide all creative professionals, spokespeople, staff, and board members' external messages. It can even serve as a management tool to help prioritize future business opportunities, ensuring they are grown from a solid, established competitive advantage.
Creative Brief
For organizations that have a clear understanding of their brand essence, the first step in the development of a storytelling oriented website is to develop the creative brief. A greatly shortened version of our more in-depth Brand Mantra process, the creative brief provides structure for creative approaches with a concise outline of:
- Clear online business goals and success metrics
- Detailed profiling of the target audience and their perceptions and needs
- An understanding of what we wish their perceptions to be after they hear our messages
- Documenting and ranking actions we want our target audience to take
- Creating the brand personality, promise, positioning, and reasons our audience will believe our claims
The brief drives the concept, content, and design decisions for the project, ensuring everything we develop meets your business objectives and is based on a rock solid foundation.
Note: We published a PPT presentation that is a good overview of our Brand Mantra process (focused on an audience of Social Enterprises) as well as a blank template for our Creative Brief in this blog post.