Booklet - Communications Development

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The third stage in our brand development process is to develop a communications platform to the point where you can publish brand / communications guidelines.

1. Business Standout / CA$H - assessing the overall strength of your brand and the competitive "brandscape" - key question: "Is my proposition strong?"

2. TOP Brand Definition - defining your brand ultimately as an articifical person with a fresh, compelling and differentiated proposition

3. Communications Development (this process) - developing the creative elements of the brand and the communications plan

Once you have done this, you need to formalise the resultant communications structure with universal guidelines that shape and police all communications related to the brand.

Messaging

It is arguable whether you develop your brand messages from your brand definition before you work on the creative treatment of the brand or vice-versa.

We believe that this is an iterative process, and that by developing your brand messages first you will provide the creative people with extra guidelines, not that creative people always appreciate those additional guidelines (although they inevitably claim to if you are not happy with what they produce).

Developing the brand messages is about starting with your brand definition and trying to decide which descriptors will be most appealing to the customer segments you are strategising to attract.

You then have to decide whether you can ‘own’ those descriptors over and above the claims of the competition.

This cannot be a purely internal process, although it will usually start there. Any messages you develop need to be fed into an image battery.

In order to develop your messages, you should obviously brainstorm which messages are most appropriate for you to use, but you should also analyse the messages used by key competitors or by non-competitive suppliers in related / comparable markets.

Finalising messaging

At the end of the market research process you should have an understanding of which messages have the most pertinence and compulsion for the customer and who, if anybody, owns those messages in the perceptions of the customer.

Typically, you will do more than a straight analysis of ‘scores on doors’ of the data. If you apply correlational ‘factoring’ techniques, you will get a sense of whether several messages can work together to deliver a bigger impact to the (potential) customer. Conjoint analysis can achieve the same result.

You also have to be aware of impacts on different segments of customers. People will usually buy your products / services for four or five different reasons – cluster and factor analysis should sort this out, but there are some other strong research techniques such as attribution research where customers are simply allowed to describe their experiences free-form and the analyst counts up how often they use certain messages and whether those messages are related to favourable or negative emotions.

Typically, so long as the messages do not flatly contradict each other, you can use contrasting messages in the market at the same time. Potential customers tend to mask out messages that don’t interest them and tend to ignore variations of messages being produced by the same brand so long as they are not actually dissonant.

Creative illustration

We do not presume to be able to mechanise the process of creatively illustrating your brand so that it captures the hearts and minds of (potential) customers on an emotional level. It is primarily an intuitive process which has allowed advertising and communications agencies to earn large fees from clients.

It is about illustrating the sizzle of the sausage so that it engages all sensations – touch, taste, sight, sound, feeling and movement.

Some people want the logo to deliver the whole package, but it is a very rare logo that achieves this – for our money perhaps the Nike swoosh has got the closest (cost about $US 50 – so don’t listen too hard when people say “You get what you pay for.”).

A logo should obviously reflect the essence of the brand, but its first role is to act as a recognisable brand signature – the mark on the cow, in fact. Maybe, just maybe, it will deliver more than that, but more usually the ‘more’ it delivers is as a result of the accumulation of other images and messages you have used in connection with the brand becoming sub-consciously attached to the logo.

Our advice is that you shouldn’t spend a fortune trying to track down a silver bullet for your logo. If your (potential) customers correctly say “Ah, that’s …..” when they catch sight of your logo and it doesn’t actually revolt them, you have done your job.

There is a whole mythology about the symbolic use of colours too, which is not to say that the ‘myths’ are not true.

There are also many confounding factors. For instance, the “Colour Me Beautiful” belief is that we tend to prefer colour palettes that flatter our skin tones – usually categorised as Spring, Summer, Autumn/Fall or Winter. Different cultures have different takes on specific colours too. In Russia and China red is the colour of beauty; in the West it is more often perceived as aggressive (in the good and bad sense). Notoriously, black or deep red is the colour of death in the West, whereas it is white in China.

Come to your own conclusions as to how much you want to believe all this but, whatever you decide, try to pick colours that people can actually see. This is critical for your website. While you can always contrast a light colour against a dark background, most business-to-business and heavyweight websites have white backgrounds.

What can be said for colours can also be said of fonts although the first difference will be whether you can read it or not. Arial and Verdana are generally regarded as the most easily read standard fonts for use on the Internet (followed by Times New Roman, Courier, MS Sans Serif and Tahoma), although they are nothing like as intimate as ‘joined-up’ cursive script (best reserved for feely-touchy applications).

The images you use are also vital. The first thing to decide is the extent to which you are going to rely on literal product / service shots, and how much you want to use images to create a broader wrap-around effect. Traditional B2B companies tend to blow customers out of the water with shot after shot after shot of their industrial widget in all its practicality. Such images typically scream “commodity” at the customer, so these sorts of images should be employed primarily in price-fighting or technical areas (although customers do like to see an image of a product or service eventually – just not first).

Famously, if you want to create a veneer of approachability and warmth, show lots of images of people’s faces. Even babies of a few days old instinctively react appreciatively to human faces.

According to NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming, the psychological analysis of hidden communicators, human beings tend to prefer three main ‘channels’ of communication:

• visual – imagery (approx. 35%)
• auditory – sound (approx. 25%)
• kinaesthetic - feeling, touch, taste and movement (40%)

This explains why reading is considered to be going out of fashion (who looks at manuals nowadays unless they are ‘techies’?) and why videos and PodCasts are becoming the primary means of delivering information, a reality that Google is desperately trying to adapt to in its search algorithms strategy.

Of course, technological developments can be inhibitors here, but in the era of cheaper and cheaper data storage and thicker and thicker broadband pipes, the barriers to the delivery of imagery and sound are not as significant as they were.

The next step will be to develop programmes that can reach out and touch you (the vibrator effects on game consoles are precursors of this technology) and those which can give you full-sensory simulation – touch, taste, movement, smell, sound etc.. This may sound far off, but many brands have a policy of offering customers a 30-day free trial.

Preliminary communications guidelines

Let’s assume that as a result of the foregoing exercises of message development, research and creative treatments, you now have tentative communications guidelines. What next?

Well, one next step is to research what you have come up with, to make sure that the imagery etc. that you have developed really does provoke the compulsion and affinity in (potential) customers that you have been hoping for. There are many ways of doing this, but a couple of techniques that will provide a very good idea as to whether you have hit the hot buttons or not revolve around eye-testing.

Advanced eye-tracking techniques will follow the customers’ lines of sight around a page or a screen and measure how much time they spend on which objects, and in which order. Typically, customers will go straight to and linger longest on the items which most gain their attention and intrigue them. What are you doing which is almost literally eye-catching? If, on the other hand, customers’ eyes whizz around all over the place, never settling except in a cross-eyed position, you are seriously confusing them and not providing them with anything attractively enough presented to latch onto.

The other eye-testing approach is NLP. Actually, it is not merely where people place their eyes which gives the game away, it is their overall posture. A skilled NLP practitioner can soon tell you whether your customers are warming to your presentation of the brand or not.

Once you have developed a set of core treatments of the brand communications that you are confident will have the desired impact on (potential) customers, you need to apply these core treatments to every communicator for the brand.

The critical issue here is consistency.

No matter how a (potential) customer wishes or happens to communicate with your brand, the same ‘truths’ need to come to the fore in terms of messages, imagery, colour, fonts and other effects.

Obviously, there are going to be considerable differences between the media you use. The trustworthy Scottish voice of your call centre should not come across as all “Och aye the noo!” in your sales literature, so you have to find ways of communicating ‘honesty’ in different ways in different media. However, what should absolutely not happen is that your call centre sounds all ‘honest’ and your sales literature is all ‘hard sell’ (or vice-versa). If you spend a lot of time simplifying the navigation on your websites, you should do the same for your call-routing system.

Customers will tolerate a level of variability, but not past the point of confusion.

As an example, McDonalds have had to address the issue of “What is an allowable variation and what causes a basic confusion in the customer’s relationship with the brand?” across geographical boundaries (your products and their packaging are your #1 and #2 communicators of the brand).

The insistence on ensuring consistency may seem an extremely obvious point but it is one where many if not most brands trip up on a regular basis, especially if they communicating with customers across different internal divisions or departments.

The sales literature says “We are very flexible” and the statements say “Late payments incur penalties” as if they were addressing different people (which they may or may not be). This sales division says “Our products are cheap and cheerful” and another sales division says “Our products are designed to the highest standards by world experts” – all under the same brand name but with radically conflicting imagery.

One thing for sure is that if you work for a company of any size, you will have some customers and prospects who will know the ins and outs of your company better than you do. Some of the time this is a good thing and means that inconsistencies are overlooked in favour of loyalty. More often it will mean that customers will be able to embarrass you into concessions which are highly advantageous to them. Occasionally, you will be on the wrong end of ‘terrorists’, determined to inflict as much pain on your organisation as they believe you have inflicted on them.

For the nuts and bolts of ensuring consistency, you will need to adopt a distributed communications management system that stores all communications that have been published, allows employees to build on good examples, and reminds people of the guidelines and the sign-off procedures.

Topics within the e-booklet that accompanies the toolset:

1. Messaging
2. Image battery research
3. Finalising messaging
4. Creative illustration
5. Creativity tools
6. Brainstorming
7. Force-Fit
8. Ridiculous!
9. Preliminary communications guidelines
10. Foundational stories
11. Expert assessment
12. Brand scorecard

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