Why read this? : We go through the essentials of brand essence. Learn how you define it, and why it matters so much. We share the 5 criteria at the heart of all great brand essences. Plus, learn from our examples of good and bad brand essences. Read this to help you master brand essence.
We see lots of marketing agencies offering to share free insights with you.
But then, you realise you have to give them your email to get it. And then have them hound you with special offers all the time.
Or, they offer an informal 30 minute face-to-face coffee chat. Not that there’s much of that happening, right now, with Covid-19 and all that.
So this week, we thought we’d be different. We thought we’d share an insight, no strings attached.
And it’s this. Of all the topics we cover on our website, the most connected page is the one on brand identity. It has by far the most links to and from the page.
We discovered this going over our website analytics, the source of most of our digital data. (life’s pretty exciting during a near lockdown). We also found when we looked at search trends around brand expertise, it’s brand identity terms people search most for.
These 2 facts gave us a small a-ha moment. The prominence of brand identity surprised us. We figured it’d be similar in connectivity and search importance to our other marketing content. But brand identity coming out as our most connected business topic (and we have a lot of topics) felt significant.
It’s really brought home how brand identity links together everything you do in marketing.
Brand identity - The DNA that defines your business
Of course, we knew brand identity was important. We’ve worked in marketing a long time, so d’uh.
But it reinforced just how much brand identity connects everything you. And how important it is to marketing success.
But if it’s so important, then how much time do you actually spend on it? We bet, nowhere near as much as you should.
We have to admit we didn’t spend much time on brand identity when we launched our brand. Better to be quick than to be perfect.
When we started Three-Brains, it was based on our belief that connecting marketing, creative, and e-commerce expertise together helps businesses succeed. This connected thinking helps businesses outperform their competitors.
We wrote about this in our story when we launched. But we realised recently this belief isn’t our actual brand identity. It’s only a part of our brand identity.
It’s one of the tangible assets which lives in the middle of our brand wheel. Along with other tangible assets like our colour palette and our logo design.
(Our brand identity guide covers how to create a brand wheel by the way).
So, we’ve taken the current Covid-19 quiet time to work on refining our own brand identity.
And there’s a few things we’d like to share from that, about the brand identity process, and especially getting to your brand essence.
Brand essence - 5 key criteria
Your brand essence is a short snappy statement that’s central to everything you do.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
And yet, it’s probably the toughest part of building your brand. Because it needs to be short, memorable, relevant, distinctive and also unite and bring people together at the same time. That’s quite a chunky old challenge for mere words.
Let’s pick those apart a little.
Short and memorable
Well, obviously, there’s the challenge of squeezing the brand essence into a small text box. Because that’s all the space you get on whatever brand wheel, diamond or pyramid you use to capture the details of your brand identity.
So, it has to be short.
Writing short is often harder than writing long. We’re reminded of the famous Mark Twain quote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”.
But making it short also makes it easier to remember. That’s because we remember information easier when it’s broken into short chunks. (see our design psychology article for more on chunking). And it’s important everyone remembers what your brand essence is.
Part of the challenge to define your short and memorable brand essence is it forces you to make choices. One of our favourite pieces of wisdom came from a colleague who used to tell her kids, you can do anything you want. But you can’t do everything you want.
That applies to your brand essence too. It’s impossible for it to cover everything you do. You have to write it so it focusses on the one big thing which sums up your brand. You have to choose what that is.
Safety if you’re Volvo. Happiness if you’re Disney. Dotardity if you’re Donald Trump. (thanks for that one, North Korea).
The shorter something is, the easier it is to remember it. Keep your essence short.
1 or 2 word essences are easy to remember. But it’s often hard to be so concise. And 3 word essences can also work, because 3 is an easy way for people to remember things when you’re telling a story. Any longer is pushing it though.
Relevant and distinctive
You then need to make those few words relevant and distinctive, That can be a bit of a creative thinking challenge.
How do you make your brand essence not sound generic, the same as everyone else? How do you avoid playing it safe?
As per our business books that stand out article on distinctiveness bias, people won’t notice or remember anything which looks or sounds like everything else. You have to be different to stand out.
One of the challenges is brand essences are often crafted by teams. And everyone on the team has their own view on the essence. Because the essence applies to everything you do, it’s one of the tougher marketing decisions you have to make.
Which means you often end up with a bolted together compromise essence. One that’s meant to keep internal teams feeling like they’ve contributed.
But that’s not what it’s for. It should focus on what it means for external impact. You have to bring the essence together in a more unifying way which focuses on the customer.
Unifying
It’s fine to use a team to craft the brand essence. But the final decision should be up to the brand owner identified at the start of the brand development process.
They should have the authority and responsibility to make the final call on brand essence. And the rest of the team have to unify behind and support that decision. It has to being people together.
Brand essence - real-life (paraphrased) examples
For confidentiality reasons, we won’t share exact brand essences here. But thanks to thesaurus.com, we’ve paraphrased the essence of 2 brands we know well to show examples which meet our criteria for ‘great’ brand essences. And to show the opposite, we’ll share another example which is far less great.
Unavoidably audacious
The first was a premium alcohol brand with an identity built around confidence and success.
Its essence (or close enough to it) was “unavoidably audacious”. That’s a great essence.
Unavoidable creates a sense of confidence or inevitability which when aligned with audacious creates a very distinctive start to the brand identity.
This set the tone for every packaging development and every piece of marketing communication for the next couple of years.
Resulting in great sales growth. Double digit sales growth. Consecutive years in a row.
(see our being audacious for competitive advantage article for more on this).
Pragmatic opinions
Similarly, another alcohol brand but with a very different target audience set its essence as “pragmatic opinions’.
It was the sort of brand older guys would drink with their mates at the end of an evening.
They didn’t really care what people thought of them anymore. They had strong opinions about how to fix the world and no fear in sharing those opinions.
So pragmatic opinions then as the brand essence.
A great essence. It related to the target audience, the consumption moment, and found a distinctive position compared to competitors.
It led to great sales growth, a unique position in the market and award-winning advertising campaigns.
So good it's worth talking about - meh?
So 2 good examples to learn from. How about one which wasn’t so good?
Well again, with some paraphrasing, here’s the essence of a well-known food brand : “so good, it’s worth talking about”.
See the difference between this essence and the previous ones?
6 words. Not short. To be fair, it was fairly relevant to the moment the product was consumed. (it was ‘good’ and it was consumed with other people).
But is it memorable? Distinctive?
Could that essence be any other brand? Yes, of course it could.
You can probably think of half a dozen other brands which could have that essence. Which means it should really have gone back to the drawing board. Unfortunately, it didn’t.
This was a brand which was limping along with low growth rates mainly fuelled by innovation, sales promotions and lots of price discounting.
But bland and forgettable advertising campaigns. Several of which didn’t even relate back to this brand essence at all. It was so average, it isn’t worth talking about.
Now, having a short, memorable, relevant, distinctive and unifying brand essence doesn’t guarantee you business growth.
But it’s a hugely important step in the brand development process.
Brand essence and a challenging question to ask yourself
So, if you’re creating, reviewing or refining your brand essence right now, have a long think about whether it meets those criteria.
Is is short and memorable?
If you have a team of people working on it internally or with the agency, throw in a surprise “what’s our brand essence?” question in the middle of a teleconference. See if everyone can say it without having to look it up.
That’s a good test to see if it’s memorable.
Is it relevant and distinctive? Could one of your competitors put their logo above your brand essence and say the same thing?
Go on. Try it.
And does your essence bring people together? Does it kill any ambiguity or lack of clarity about you and what your brand stands for?
A small confession
We’ve a small confession. When we launched Three-Brains, we’d didn’t have a brand essence. Or really a clearly defined brand identity. And yet, here’s us stressing how important it is.
Like many business owners, we just had too many other things to worry about. We knew we’d get to it eventually, but it wasn’t top of our launch plan list.
And that was a mistake.
As we said at the start we’d a story about why we started and what we were trying to do. But the consequence of not building the brand identity at the start is some disjointed content which lacked a common theme. It didn’t hang together well.
And so a lot of people on first encountering us, probably didn’t know what we stood for. Why we were different. Just another marketing consultancy. Plenty of those about.
Now we have a brand essence
It’s 3 words long. And it’s memorable, relevant and distinctive. It’s going to be part of everything we do from now on.
And you know what?
In these challenging times, we’ve seen a lot of other marketing consultants and agencies pushing out ads about why their so-called marketing expertise matters ‘right now’.
And it’s pretty clear, they’re following a formula.
A cut-and-paste approach to business. But if they were true marketers, they’d realise this approach has no short, memorable, relevant, distinctive and unifying essence. We don’t believe those guys will be successful in the long-run.
Don’t be one of those guys. Get your brand essence sorted and set yourself up to succeed.
And your brand essence is …
Oh yeah, we hinted at that before. And then went away from it.
Well, actually, our brand essence is what we think will make us more competitive in the challenging times to come. So it’s not something we’re going to share right now. And it shouldn’t be something you should share either.
Your brand essence isn’t your slogan or brand strapline. But those should come from what’s in your brand essence.
So you’ll see our brand essence come out through our intangible and tangible assets. Which if you’ve read our (free! no download or email sign-up) brand identity guide, you’ll know come next in the process.
Watch this space.
Check out our brand identity guide for more on this. Or email us if you need help to create and refine your own brand essence.
Photo credit
Brand identity : Photo by Patrik Michalicka on Unsplash
Conversation : Photo by Joshua Ness on Unsplash
Man looking at ceiling (adapted) : Photo by Anton Danilov on Unsplash
Volvo : Photo by Adam Cai on Unsplash
Flowers : Photo by Photo by Rupert Britton on Unsplash
Schumacher outfit : Photo by ZU photography on Unsplash
I am bold : Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash
Question Mark on Tree : Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash
