Your Naked Brand
Often, branding companies create graphic standards and brand voice guidelines. These documents describe how to write sentences and which words to use or not use – all are important elements of corporate communication (unless they are used as manacles to imprison ideas). Some of what goes for such guidelines is basically just good design and competent writing skills. Much of it deals with use of color and logos. But when push comes to brand, such things are standard equipment.
When you get to down to the soul of a brand, these branding guidelines are a lot like clothes. We all wear them, but who are we when we are naked, without our logos and campaigns and colors?
We are our brand.
I have done this for a while now and I understand what brand standards and graphic guidelines and brand voice documents are saying and I know what they are trying to accomplish. I am not saying these things are not important. When a brand gets alone with a consumer, however, what happens then?
Instead of looking for the right blend of verbs and nouns, why not reach for some ideas. A Brand Voice is something deeper and more compelling than the length of your sentences and choice of your words. Think about the space between the words. Often the ideas that connect your words together are the very same ideas that connect your brand to people. Sometimes the spaces between the words are where your Brand Experience can be found.
Do you go to a theater to see the projectionist correctly thread the machines, make sure the glass is clean, adjust the lenses and tweak the sound? Those things are certainly necessary and important, but they are not what makes a great movie experience. That takes more. It takes a great movie.
I would hope that anyone who writes any communication for their brand has enough skill to understand interesting, uncomplicated communication and enough talent to write it effectively. Just make it a good story. Business writing doesn’t have to be dull.
Brand Voice is the reality and personality of a brand. It was not the words in the Declaration of Independence or the vowels in the Constitution that made those documents great. It was the ideas soaked up by the words. Those ideas are the Brand Voice of the USA. It is our cultural DNA, our collective story. Your brand has the same things. Find them. Don’t just tell them, help people experience them.
If I described you to someone who has never met you, would I describe your dress or shoes or your hair? Or would I describe you – as a person?
The question is: How do you breathe life into a brand, pushing it far beyond logos and colors and sentence structure? How do you create a brand experience for everyone who comes in contact with it? How do you build a comfortable home for your brand in the most important piece of real estate in the world – that valuable space between people’s ears and that hard to reach place in their hearts?
That is what a Brand Voice needs to inspire. It must start the task of building a visceral connection. When we think of Apple or their iPod or iPhone, how do we feel? How does Nike approach athletics? How does Honda approach ergonomics or the environment? How does Method approach household products?
So many brand documents read like a brochure telling us a Porsche has wheels and an engine. But how will a Porsche make us feel? What will a Porsche mean for me between Point A and Point B or even if it is just sitting in my garage or driveway?
As brand engineers, we must understand tools and processes versus experiences and results. We have to look through plans and see people. We must simplify more than our words and sentences and color palettes. Building a brand is like rearing a child or getting married.
At the end of the strategy and campaigns and ideas and manufacturing and operations and sales and service and distribution, when the slogans are changed and the logos are updated and the new ads are run, what is your customer left with?
Your naked brand.