Branding is how you present your organization to the world. It’s your personality, your voice, and your essence. It’s your history, your vision, and your future. Consistent, strong brand messaging helps people remember and believe in you.
A Brand Messaging Foundation is the basis for every message, every marketing campaign, and every customer conversation you have with your audience.
A Brand Messaging Foundation (also called a Brand Charter or Brand Positioning document) helps discover and establish what makes your brand resonate. The end result is a tool for your content writers, sales staff, and the rest of your team communication about your brand and your product brands most effectively.
Your Brand Messaging Foundation should have at least these three main components:
If you were to attend a Pybop Branding Workshop, in this hour we'd talk about the organization's past, hopes and dreams, promises to the audience, and what you hope that the audience will say when you’re not around.
This leads to messaging that shares why you exist and helps people understand your origin story. It's tremendously important for credibility and loyalty. People want to believe in you.
What we're driving at here is your brand's purpose, value, and personality. In our virtual workshops with our clients, in this section, we reflect on your audiences and their needs), hopes and dreams, expectations, and obstacles. Based on these needs, we’ll articulate the purpose of your company/product (to serve these needs), the end value that your brand brings the audience, and the way your brand interacts with the audience.
This leads to brand themes that live and breathe. It aligns real-world problems with tangible, understandable solutions. It helps people know what's in it for them.
In the first two components, we're exploring and describing the brand in different ways, but we're not literally articulating anything in a way we could present the audience. In this section of the Brand Messaging Foundation, we get into the weeds and start expressing the brand literally. We develop the brand's Overview Statement, Tagline, Elevator Pitch, Boilerplate, Vocabulary, and Positioning Statement -- all extremely important for not only corporate functions, but also for website writers and marketing writers to leverage in their articles and campaigns.
Other components of the foundation might include Delivery Methods and Visual Communications.
Need help with your brand messaging foundation? Ask Pybop about hosting an online workshop for a group of your smartest brand ambassadors, to let them share their insights and knowledge of your brand.
Shelly Bowen, MFA, is a content writer, content strategist, and founder of Pybop.
For decades, Shelly has written for businesses on complex topics from disease prevention and medical devices to alternative energy and leveraging data. Today, she's hyper-focused on supporting B-B technology businesses. In her spare time, she hikes, kayaks, draws, and works on her T-Bird.
A wide variety of brands rely on Shelly as an essential freelance writer and content strategy resource.
Follow Shelly on Instagram @pybop or connect on LinkedIn. More about Shelly and Pybop.
