Creating your brand's communication code: The shorthand of icons, the choice of the right vocabulary
Bringing your brand to market without a communication foundation is like going on a blind date. A successful connection is left to chance.
A fruitful brand foundation serves several purposes, internal and external. Internally, it can become the primer and guardrails for definitive creative direction - both visual and verbal - and the basis for evaluation and critique. It will speak in a fashion a creative team will understand and can work from, and provides a shared basis of understanding in the development of brand true communication and creative expression.
TVB’s brand and messaging foundation platform is a response to the legacy of the unwieldy annual “brand plan,” or other overly complex and long branding exercises that become archived documents that are mostly unusable and inefficient in day to day brand development.
Created from a range of classical and succinct marketing models, this short and iterative document accomplishes most phases in a single page. This starts with the root of emotional and functional drivers - sets of 3 to 4 simple and discreet factors that uniquely propel a brand - especially in combination.
Constituent segmentation is next - where we define audiences, and importantly provide specific context (and relative importance) of our drivers for each, and a concluding marketing insight to reach them effectively for the brand. Important one-pagers that are great tools to develop and evaluate targeted expression.
Next, the “brand proposition” creates the elevator pitch - where brevity makes each word count.
The brand “unifying idea” and “brand commandments” should be the internal rally cry for the brand, and sometimes have direct external relevance and as a sustaining tagline and brand beliefs.
We build a brand personality ladder - which allows the viewer to understand where the concluding adjectives come from, for greater understanding and application.
A brand vocabulary and “brand blurbs” are built up from this base, identifying words and phrases that will create a familiar “communication code” for the end user, allowing even them to become more efficient in their understanding of your communication.
