How Disconnected Is Your Brand Strategy From Your Comms Strategy?
As a “hybrid” Brand and Comms strategist, I often feel like brand marketing lives in Los Angeles and comms marketing lives in New York City. Two large cities that communicate but not nearly enough to make it feel fluidly collaborative.
This is one of those problems in marketing that people seem to anecdotally spot but don’t really have time to address because, most marketers have a million other fires to put out so why start a new one? Especially one that will impact every touchpoint of your brand?
The chronic problem with this disconnection is that Brand Strategy doesn’t verb, it just sits, stuck in different silos throughout the organization — never coming to fruition, never attaining usability, and most importantly, never reaching your people.
Symptoms you’re suffering from Brand & Comms disconnect:
You don’t see any of your Brand Strategy thinking in the real world
Your customers have no idea what you stand for
Comms forgets to market the brand and prioritizes the product
There are brand inconsistencies in your communications
You have 20+ strategy work streams, often with a lot of inconsistency
Why it’s worth solving
It is worth solving so that your consumers can feel your brand’s purpose when they encounter you in the wild. By not thinking through how your brand's foundational elements translate into your yearly, monthly, day-to-day Comms, you lose the opportunity for your consumer to experience your brand’s purpose — at any touchpoint they encounter you at.
Who’s nailing it
The big brands do this fairly well because they understand the power of a brand. Take Coca Cola for example, always iterating their brand purpose within optimism — from their famous Christmas commercials to their Share a Coke campaign. The brand purpose, through two different campaigns and two different parts of the funnel, was experienced by both the viewer of the Christmas ad and the person picking up that Coca-Cola in-store. Fast forward to today.
Look at Dame, a women-founded company engineering sex toys that encourage vulnerability, heighten intimacy and add education to your bedroom. Their purpose — closing the pleasure gap — comes to life in awareness channels such as brand acts/PR (“Women’s Sex Toy Startup Sues New York City MTA over ‘Double Standard’) and also traditional conversion channels like email (Dame email Subject: From sin to self-care). You feel their intention whether you’re learning about Mindful Sex in one of their workshops or your helping them design their products as a member of Dame Labs — their brand is there, proving you can trust it, proving its value, proving you should continue to support it — wherever you are. We need more Dames.
Steps to solve Brand & Comms disconnect:
Dig into this question, “how is my brand experienced in the world?” Think back on the last 15 pieces of communication you worked on and ask yourself, how did I integrate the brand strategy into these? If the answer is, we have brand guidelines that everyone uses, there’s work to do.
Evaluate how usable your brand strategy deliverables truly are. Ask your comms team if they understand the Brand Strategy and feel confident in executing it. Notice if most of your comms is focused on sales-initiatives or product-initiatives. While selling a product is important, you should be selling the brand and product at the same time, always. Bringing these teams together is a healthy first-step in understanding how best to get your brand into your communications beyond the “brand marketing” campaign budget.
Build a system to easily integrate more brand strategy into your current structure. Talk to both the Brand and the Comms teams to understand where any friction may live. Find ways to bring the teams closer together by evolving the process. Update your marketing org chart and processes connect the actual humans. Once the teams feel more connected, your strategy will too.
Evolve your brand guidelines. Once you understand where your brand strategy is getting stuck, you can rebuild the guidelines to solve it. Brand Guidelines should push past design, feel dynamic and most importantly give comms teams and creatives the courage and confidence to bring the brand strategy to life in every piece of communication they make.
Hire us to connect your Brand and Comms with our Connect Brand and Comms four-week project. In partnership, we’ll evaluate your org chart, identify solutions to get your teams talking and find efficient adjustments to bring the two closer together. For the month of September, we’re offering free consults on the topic so please reach out for a 60 min deep dive with us to talk through connecting your Brand and Comms initiatives.
Shortening the gap between Brand and Comms will not only make your internal teams stronger and more connected but your consumers will know who you are, wherever they find you.