Brand Voice 101: Startup Branding Series
Need help with your startup branding? Check out my work with me page or contact me for details about my services.
When you hear the term “brand story” what comes to mind? For me, I see the term “brand story” as something that encompasses the life cycle of your customers and their perspective of your startup. From first impression to long-term loyalty, your brand story has to resonate with the users you’re seeking to acquire.
As a professional storyteller, I can name the delight I get when a startup speaks to me clearly. It’s storytelling, plain and simple, and good brand stories turn cell phones into status symbols, and daily coffee into a luxury item.
I remember the first time I got a Macbook Air as a gift for Christmas. “This computer is for creative people, so it’s made just for writers like you,” my Dad, an avid programmer and Mac devotee, told me as he handed me the slim white box.
That felt like magic. Not just because I was trading in a hand-me-down Dell clunker in for a sleek MacBook Air. It was more than that: I was stepping into the hallowed halls of MacBook owners. I was a creative, now. It didn’t matter that my devotion to my craft existed before the Mac. It mattered that I had a machine that was imbued with the kinds of descriptors I associated with myself.
Brand Voice 101: Mission, Vision, Manifesto, About
When you hire a branding expert such as myself, we’re always going to start with the building blocks of your brand story.
There are four items I recommend nailing down before you move on:
Mission. The “why” of you and your company. Don’t get this confused with your founder’s story. This is meant to be your North Star that everything should be filtered through. Does this fit our mission? Does this support our mission? Your mission is front and center, and it’s what brings people into your orbit.
Vision. The “where” of your journey, without getting too deep into specifics. Your vision is the theme that lights the road ahead. It’s the “we may be at ABC, but we’re looking to disrupt and change XYZ for the better.”
Manifesto. A manifesto is generally an internal document. It’s shared amongst your freelancers, employees, and collaborators you want to inspire and energize.
About. Your “about” blurb is the short 1-2 sentence summary of who you are and what you do. It’s something that gets used for press releases, “about page” web copy, and other documents. It’s your go-to pitch on your company that’s fine-tuned to hit every part of who you are and what you do and it’s external-facing.
These aren’t things you write over a weekend and they’re good to go forever. As you learn more from your customers and continue to shape your startup, these things are going to change. That’s okay: leave room for the natural evolution of you and your company. The goal for early-stage startups is to sprint hard and fail fast. There will always be pivots along the way, but the goal is to have these tenets of your brand story to know where you are now so that when you adjust course, you know how to get from here to there.
Solidifying these core parts of your brand story will also allow you to work more effectively with a team to get the materials you’re looking for. I’ll be making some branding case studies at a later date on this blog to break down some of my personal experiences with branding and teamwork, so be sure to subscribe to my newsletter to get updates on new blog posts.
Diagnosing the Tone of Your Brand Story
Whether I’m working with a brand new startup or a company that’s already established, I love walking my clients through a Brand Diagnostic meeting.
In this meeting, I work on aligning a brand’s tone with their ideal customer’s preferred messaging.
Tone is so important in every aspect of storytelling and marketing. Your target audience responds to a specific type of messaging, and you either need to be in line with that messaging, or take a particular stance to disrupt your competitor’s messaging. Every piece of your tone must be razor-sharp in its intent. Don’t mince words, just make your competitors mincemeat by being more thoughtful than they are about what your customers want to hear from you.
A quick way to hone in on your brand tone is to pick 3 — and only 3 — of the following descriptors to describe your brand, or pick your own 3 descriptors that distill down the essence of who you are and what you do:
Professional
Sleek
Spicy
Disruptive
Confident
Mellow
Confrontational
Innocent
Helpful
Conversational
Bold
Sustainable
Simple
Minimal
Maximal
Elegant
Luxury
Accessible
Warning: you’ll undermine your entire brand presence by choosing too many contradictory descriptors, or too many in general. It’s okay to find nuance in your tone descriptors, but you can’t serve your luxury customers by being both “luxury” and “accessible.” The whole point of luxury is to be exclusive, hard to reach, and if everyone can have “everyday luxury” then chances are you’re not advertising to luxury customers: you’re actually speaking to people who are in the 99% who want to be the 1%, which is very different from marketing to the 1%.
Prada and Giorgio Armani aren’t out here in these streets trying to give us some sweet discounts. However, brands like Away Luggage are trying to make nicer pieces feel more accessible at a $200-$300 price point, rather than luxury brands like Rimowa that expects you to drop a few thousand dollars on a steel suitcase. Away isn’t trying to chip away at Rimowa’s market: because if you can afford Rimowa, you probably are going to go more high-end. Away is trying to get the everyman market, and offers lifetime guarantees to de-risk their slightly higher price point for the average buyer.
In summary? You need to know exactly who you’re targeting so that your brand story can reflect that, down to the descriptive words you’re picking for your brand voice.
Your Customer’s Hero’s Journey
I’m going to talk a bit more about this in another blog post, but one of the key aspects of brand story is your customer’s journey.
I use the descriptor of the Hero’s Journey with its roots in mythological structure as captured by Joseph Campbell. If you’ve touched a book on storytelling, you’ll recognize that Joseph Campbell is the OG of analyzing the hero’s journey.
Essentially:
Your customer exists in their day-to-day environment with their standard problems
Along comes your product, which gives them hope of solving some of their problems, and the promise of a better life
They embark on a journey to get to know your brand and your options
They are walked through the trials and tribulations they’ve faced, and finally find a perfect solution, tailor made by you
They become a customer for life, forever changed by your brand and how they help you be a better, more inspired person
Every piece of brand story needs to fall under one of those pillars of the hero’s journey. Your copy is here to educate, inspire, and empower your ideal customers in every part of their interaction with your brand.
This is where content marketing comes in. I’ll be real, here: I think most social media marketing is ineffective. There are a few exceptions to this, such as organic TikTok content and Pinterest marketing of your existing content. However, the core of your strategy should be in content creation and marketing.
If you’re reading this blog post, there’s a very good chance you came from Google. I’ve spent years honing my SEO so that I get my ideal customers straight to my site, without having to spend a dime on paid marketing or a social media marketing “expert.” All of my content is set to auto-post on other channels, and I personally curate the social content that matters (my newsletter, this blog, and interacting with my community on TikTok and Twitter.)
I use the hero’s journey quite a bit in my own content marketing strategies. I’m a natural educator, so most of my content is geared toward helping others learn, or teaching business owners what to think about when it comes to their own content or approach to storytelling. Sharing my knowledge can also be put under categories like “thought leadership” but I prefer content marketing because it feels less cult-y and I see myself more as a creator and collaborator.
Anyways, I’ll also dive into content marketing in another post, but in a nutshell just be sure to think of your customers and their pain points in the form of narrative storytelling to give them the credit and content they deserve.
3 Tips for Honing Your Brand Story
Okay, it’s time, we’re here for the grand reveal of: my top 3 tips for executing a brand story in a seamless, cohesive way.
Brand story is all about top-down cohesiveness. If the foundations of your brand story are jumbled or unclear, every other piece of copy and visual assets you generate for your brand will be, too. You need to get clear on the top-level of your mission and vision before doing anything else.
Your brand story should be emotional. Meaning, it should elicit an emotion from your customers. Whether that’s joy or surprise or relief or whatever, you need to get clear on how people should feel when they’re interacting with you and your brand. Your story should be built around those emotions.
All great brand stories can be told simply. No matter how your customer comes in contact with you, they should feel the richness of your brand’s story. An image or headline should feel unique to your brand, and like you’ve plucked a page out of your brand’s story that feels fully developed. Your customers should know the feeling of your brand even before they dive fully into who you are and what your brand does.
In essence? Execution is everything, and execution begins with proper planning, strategy, and a clear understanding of the story you’re trying to tell.
Need Help with Your Startup’s Brand?
I’m here to help! Reach out and let’s chat about your branding needs. You can also check out my work with me page.