What is a brand message and how to create it?

Brand messaging is an important marketing term that is easy to confuse or misunderstand due to its quite wide meaning. Brand messaging includes what and how brand represents on every appearance: social media, website, the way the brand reacts and cares about the subscribers and the product packaging.

To create a working brand message that can address to the customers and successfully reach their attention is one of the first things every brand should crave for. Nowadays, we all care for a relationship that has a feeling of presence another human being involved in it. There is even a study that claims the following things: we tend to treat brands as humans.

What does that mean?

As consumers, we have a bias to feel toward brands the same way as we would feel about the people. Apparently, our brains can’t help but explaining everything around in anthropological terms. This is why it is vital that a brand could give people a feeling that it talks like a friend. How brand represents itself, what kind of message it spread into the world is what makes us feel about it one way or another.

The brand message is not a statement you make about your company. It’s way more complicated. It goes through the product and includes verbal and non-verbal means. Together all of it supposed to distinguish your brand from the others. If people chose to follow you or even became your customers, it means that your brand message worked.

You promised values and gave people the offer that resonated with them. If you have a company, you also need to take care of something that is called brand identity. This is what represents your entire brand. What do you do in your business and what it is about – are the basis of brand identity.

To make people associated your brand with values that are important to you, you’ve got to make a clear brand message. So, what is the proper brand message? It exists on the intersection of several things. First of all, it creates based on your perspective as a brand. Then, you have to know what is that your targeted audience wants to receive. Finally, the third ingredient is to show what is unique about your brand and your marketing promise.

The brand story also must be a part of a brand message. To feel connected to the brand, people have to know how and why it was made. The brand identity you create will have an impact on your company’s way of presenting itself.

Your own values and standards are a part of brand identity. There are two things you should before crafting your brand messaging: your brand in its entirety and who is your audience. Basically, who are you and for whom you are working.

Brand identity: the questions

What is the vital question every brand should be aware of to define itself, and therefore, to start building proper brand message?

How your company is different from the others? First of all, you should understand what is unique about your brand. This an essential thing that will help you to build your brand behavior around. It is evident that a brand has its line, way of evolving.In the very core of it, this is what your brand messaging will be built upon.

What is a unique value you offer to a customer?

To put it in other words: what you can offer that no other company can’t? Make a research about other companies and how they are representing themselves. It will help you to understand how to create a unique offer that is different from your competitors’.

Who is representing your targeted audience?

Who’s going to interact with your brand? These are vital questions about your prospect customers. If you don’t know who your message is made for, you will never build a brand messaging strategy that works.

What does it even mean to know who is your audience? It’s not only about age and interests of these people, but also subtle distinctions – what kind of language register your audience is using and recognize as their own. Crafting a proper brand message will require from you some sophistication – the target audience is often multiple, and to unify them all could be a puzzle to solve.

What kind of messaging will fit the interest of your targeted audience?

Even though you are making a base for the brand, you are still looking for ways to be audience-centered. It is better to stay at the border of what these people want to hear and what might surprise them.

What are your company’s values?

Knowing what values you are representing is like knowing the direction you undertake. It may be helpful to use the influencer marketing approach for that matter. If some influencer your brand is aligned with has a similar audience to yours, it will be a good idea to collaborate. An extra challenge to contend is to answer the next question:

Why does your audience should care?

It means you have to be in a customer’s shoes to realize whether your brand message could work or not. To make everything clear to yourself is the very first thing. For some brands, it’s a way to self-discovery.

You should also know everything you want to exclude from being in your brand message. It may include words or some typical phrases you don’t feel like a part of your campaign, language that is irrelevant to your audience, marketing cliché etc.

Communication as a part of a brand message

The goal of the brand message is to make customers genuinely interested in your brand. Besides your product, to make them curious in the brands itself. The essential part of a brand message is how you communicate with the customers. How you treat an audience online – on various social media pages, how you answer on commentaries, how you make them talk about you.

Besides direct communication, there is a kind of communication that always relates something about a brand, even though it is not addressed to anybody in particular. This is a story of your brand. Why would we call it “communication”? Because it is a vital thing that helps to create an emotional connection with a brand.

People gain access to the brand image through their perceptions of it, which is necessarily built upon what you tell about yourself as a brand. A story is a background you refer to; origin you want your audience to be aware of. With the story, your brand identity and communication became more complex and variable.

To create a brand message, you need to add all the things we have mentioned together. What will demand an extra effort from you, perhaps, even an enormous one, is to make your brand message consistent on every single platform. It should not sound the same everywhere but flow from one point to another. Prospects can be able to see what kind of benefits you offer to them without continuously repeating the same formulas.

Brand messaging style

An essential part of how you present yourself is your brand messaging style. It is how you build or just join a frame in which you are going to behave. What is the brand messaging style? By definition, it is a brand strategy you follow to present what your company is about.

Most likely, you will join the existing messaging style. You could try to create a new one, but this is requiring lots of creativity, deep understanding of the market and high risk. So, when you are stepping up into the field, you will have to compete with those who already there. Perhaps, many brands already established and solidify their presence.

The significant advantage that you receive in this approach is next: your target audience will get immediately what is your message about since you have appeared in the familiar field. Marketers call it “arm wrestling” style – this strategy can be used in a field where no market leader with somehow marked presence.

Another approach is to reframe the field. You can be ready to change the market you stepping in only if your product is revolutionary, or aims for such level. Create the category. If your brand messaging style and a product your brand working on is entirely new to the market, you have no choice but to create something new.

Maybe your strong sides don’t fit into any existing market style – in this case, you also have to create the category. The last one among these famous approaches oriented on smaller segments of the market. It is quite risky since bigger marketer leader could take all the attention. Marketers called this approach big fish, small pond.

What kind of benefits brand messaging will provide for your company?

Except for obvious things which we have already talked about, with the brand messaging strategy your company will get much more.

• Your customer services will become better;
• A team will have an opportunity to rethink content strategy;
• More effective sales department;
• Marketers from your team will have precise information to refer to.

We would also like to add that brand messaging works both ways – external, to the audience and internal, to the company employers, as well. It includes special training programs to tell about the company and its values, branded items for the team, brand guidelines, and so on. Brand message: three perspectives that cross.

First of all, we should set three types of perspective. There are: A customer’s perspective – from your customer’s view of what is important to care? Your brand messaging is first and foremost should be oriented on the customers.

A brand’s perspective – how does it look from your brand perspective? What is the vision and values you represent and protect? Perhaps, you are creating new values for the whole marketing field? The competitive perspective – what kind of message you are spreading around? How should you craft your message so it wouldn’t sound ambiguous or unclear?

Conclusions

Brand messaging is all about consistency. You need to keep the same face on every social media platform; your design and taglines should not be controversial.

Brand consistency is what solidifies the picture of your company you want people to have. A variety of approaches to a brand is not good. Your brand shouldn’t be interpreting by the customers or the audience. The meaning of brand messaging is to build the image people will associate with the brand for good.

If you make it vague or will continuously be changing – it simply won’t work. Brand consistency is key here. To develop it – for both online and offline presence is one of the most vital things one can do for the brand.