What is a Brand Message?

A brand message is any verbal expression that communicates your brand promise to an audience. One challenge in creating effective brand messaging is to avoid being repetitive. Delivering the exact same message to each audience can grow stale very quickly.

For that reason, we develop brand messaging “takeaways” for each audience, rather than word-by-word brand messages. A brand takeaway is the idea that you want each audience to have in their head every time they hear from you. You should have no more than three to four takeaways for each audience. Brand messages may change over time, but the brand ideas behind them will stick. Organizations who take this approach to brand messaging strategy create greater brand coherence, and have lasting impact with their audiences.

Brand Message Strategy Isn’t Singular

No single brand message is going to please all audiences. This doesn’t mean you have to be all things to all people. We believe all brand messages should extend from the core brand identity, but each should be crafted meet the needs of each audience. Through this approach, a brand can appeal to multiple audiences, each with different perspectives and needs, without changing the core brand essence.

Your brand strategy should help create brand coherence among all of your key audiences. While the brand messages may be different, the overall brand impression should reinforce a singular brand promise.

Brand Messaging Tools

We develop many brand messaging tools, depending on our client’s industry, goals and audience mix.

Brand Tagline: A short, memorable phrase that is conveys the essence of your brand identity. The best taglines are unique and long lasting – think “Just Do it” for Nike or “The ultimate driving machine” for BMW.

Elevator Pitch: A short version of your brand story that can be told to someone in less than 15 seconds, about the length of an elevator ride. It should contain why you exist, what you do, the audiences you serve, and how you stand out from the competition,

Brand Pillars: The core attributes that support your brand positioning strategy and the brand identity that expresses it. Brand pillars should be unique and true to your organization and easy for your internal team(s) to remember. They help determine what brand messages are appropriate and which are not.

Corporate Narrative: The externally facing version of your brand positioning statement. Corporate narratives usually exist in 25, 50, and 100-word form, to keep them flexible and easy to use.

Corporate Pitch Presentation: Corporate pitches are a more dynamic version of the corporate narrative and should succinctly express your core positioning, value proposition, brand identity, and brand messages.

Our brand messaging assignments usually conclude with the delivery of a playbook, containing the core positioning concept, the brand identity, and a messaging framework for connecting those core brand elements to all key audiences. They are a key resource for the internal and external teams who conduct campaigns and other internal and external marketing efforts.