The Essential Guide to Brand Communications

Overview

Building your brand identity is one of the most personal, difficult, and most important steps in laying a sustainable foundation for your business. Your brand is the start of building your community. Your brand sets your team and business apart from your competitors.

It earns your company credibility across your stakeholders, and it builds your community’s loyalty. It enables you to grow your business by earning the privilege of being an increasing part of your customers’ lives. Apple and Google are worth billions in brand equity alone.

Our guide is designed to help you think deeper about your brand and how you can meaningfully connect with your stakeholders. We’ll cover:

1. Defining a good brand
2. Identifying the business case for ongoing brand work
3. Building your vision, mission, and values
4. Cultivating your community
5. Standing out with storytelling
6. Exploring content marketing
7. Improving internal communications
8. Crafting consistent brand elements
9. Delivering a great customer experience
10. Takeaways & next steps

‍

Defining a good brand

Brand is much more than a logo. It enables you to:

• Raise money: Your ability as an effective and persuasive storyteller is essential to raising money. Your story will include your vision, progress, lessons learned, and what makes your team uniquely suited to address a big problem.
• Connect with supporters: You’ll need to be prepared to share your vision for the company with multiple audiences—investors, partners, media, customers. Brand encompasses your purpose and values, which, along with your vision, help your investors and partners trust your founding team and want to be part of that vision.
• Hire your team: In the early days, your key hires are signing up because they share your aspirations and how you operate. Be honest, and communicate your vision, mission, and values.
• Enable organic customer growth: Your customers can play a key role in your story by amplifying your values, products, and services. Owned content can be amplified by you so that others will consider, try, love, and grow your brand.
• Aspire beyond your first product: A strong brand foundation helps you grow beyond your first product. Your brand ultimately helps you earn the right to keep improving how your customers work and live.

So what is brand, and why is it so valuable to articulate?

At its core, your brand is your purpose—your reason for existing. And that purpose has the potential to connect you with a powerful customer and stakeholder community that will authentically fuel your growth.

The most enduring brands are purpose-driven. Articulating your purpose requires internal discussion with your founding team. To articulate your purpose, your “why,” start by asking yourself: What are we building and how is it helping people? Your brand’s “why” is eventually expressed in your mission and vision statements. After that, you and your team will identify your brand values, which codifies your vision and mission into the framework for difficult decisions, how you treat others, and your culture.

What brand is not

Branding and brand communications are not “spin.” Don’t expect your brand to hide the stink of a poorly functioning product, an indifferent customer experience, founder drama, or unethical business practices.

A strong brand elevates a customer’s first transaction into a personal interaction, which leads to brand loyalty. It’s a necessary element of any successful business.

About the author

My background is in launching authentic brands based on the work of engineers building challenging technology. I’ve had the privilege of working with Virgin Galactic, The Spaceship Company, Virgin Orbit, and Kitty Hawk’s EVTOL solutions.

I’ve helped launch the customer favorite and award-winning Virgin America, Virgin Hotels, Virgin Festival, and many other Virgin brands in North America. I’ve also worked with incredible entrepreneurs to launch brands that failed. These experiences taught me that your success is dependent on not only your product but also your community: the goodwill of your customers, partners, the media, and your team. That’s especially true for category-building products that have never before been seen or tried.

I enjoy helping founding teams craft and share their stories and progress along the way. Ultimately, the culture that you’re shaping and the interactions you’re having with customers and team are what shape your brand and your messaging. It’s already within—it just needs to take shape and to be echoed through everything you do.

‍

Identifying the business case for ongoing brand work

A strong brand impacts virtually every facet of your organization. “Brand preference creates firm value by measurably improving profits, cash flow, and [market] share,” reported Forbes.

Here are just a few stats that quantify the value of a strong brand:

• Companies that have strong reputations deliver 31% higher shareholder return.
• Strong brands have more highly engaged employees, and as a result, can grow profits 3x faster than competitors.
• The top 10 B2B brands with strong customer service saw 31% greater revenue growth over three years compared to brands with the worst customer service.
• A superior brand preference allows a company to command price premiums of 26% on average, even when product quality is the same.

A strong brand impacts virtually every facet of your organization.
Christine Choi

An effective brand positively impacts customer loyalty, organic growth, word-of-mouth marketing, shared content, customer lifetime value, media attention, stakeholder engagement. and so much more. This is why oft-cited brands like Amazon and Microsoft are valued in the hundreds of billions.

‍

Building your vision, mission, and values

The core of your brand is formed by:

1. Your brand’s vision, mission and values
2. How you tell your story internally and externally
3. Consistent brand elements

You must get those pieces working well, and working together, before you can achieve liftoff.

Vision, mission, values: Why, what, how

A founder’s job is hard. It becomes even harder if your primary reason for starting a venture is solely to make money. The “why” drives most successful entrepreneurs to invest the time, energy, and financial resources necessary to start a company. It also builds your team and stakeholders.

“What” is your mission: What does your company do?

“How” are your values: What are your operating principles?

“Why” is your vision: What are you building toward? This aspirational goal is your North Star.

How do you describe what you do to your dentist, your grandmother, and your child’s teacher? If it comes out different every time or is too long, try to distill it in a sentence.

You can do it too. There are many workshops facilitated by consultants and also templates available online. Here are the most basic steps:

1. Craft a mission statement: Your mission statement expresses what your company does. Try to use language that is authentic to you and your team. Exercise:

• Convene your core founding team.
• Spend a few quiet minutes writing out what you think is your mission statement. What does your company do? Do you connect people to something they need? Are you able to help friends and colleagues be better or faster at something? Try to incorporate your target audience, your contribution to the world (the product/service), and what makes it unique. Spend a few quiet minutes writing out what you think is your mission statement. What does your company do? Do you connect people to something they need? Are you able to help friends and colleagues be better or faster at something? Try to incorporate your target audience, your contribution to the world (the product/service), and what makes it unique.
• Share. Compare and pick out the words that resonate with the group. Debate, iterate, iterate some more, and then put it down to work on your brand values.

2. Establish your brand values: Your brand values guide behavior and decisions. Exercise:

• Be honest, and identify what you hold each other accountable for.
• Share hero moments that you want to see more of from the team.
• Identify scope creep and what you’ll need to expedite these decisions.
• Use language that’s both authentic to your culture and inspiring—always strive to be better while explaining what you hold your team accountable to.

3. Express your vision: Your vision is your North Star. Exercise:

• Discuss what is all of this for. Why are you doing this in the first place? What is its role in shaping a better future?
• Share. Your vision should aim high and might be attainable in five—or 50—years.

Doing this with your leadership team may unearth conflict or philosophical differences. That’s okay; these are useful to articulate, debate, and move forward on before they create rooted conflicts that can haunt decisions and culture down the line.

‍

Cultivating your community

As your product and company matures, your community will expand. Communication both internally and externally becomes increasingly important to keep on top of and that will require appropriate staffing.

• Your network can help amplify a need or a message—a great position you’re hiring for, share our product release, check out this great product review, join our beta, give us feedback.
• Further down the line, you may be in a bad situation and you want to make your partners aware so they’re not caught on the back foot when asked about it by the media or other stakeholders.

Who is your community?

Trust can be lost and earned every day so do not let your community feel left out. To the best of your abilities, keep them in the loop, share information and progress, and bring them along as you build your company. Build a relationship with them through your brand, and they’ll become advocates for your collective success.Identify your list, and make sure you communicate with each of them when you have news or a new product or special. Examples of stakeholders:

• Employees
• Your board members and investors
• VIPs and influencers, both existing and wish list
• Vendors and suppliers
• Retail partners and distributors
• Regulators and local authorities
• Media
• Talent networks, university affiliates, and trade associations
• Customers: Consider segmenting them (Who was your first sign-up? Who was your 1000th? The one who started as a doubter and is now a believer?)

Spotlight: Richard Branson and the power of community

Richard Branson first started his entrepreneurial career in publishing. Richard founded the magazine Student in 1966 during the Vietnam War. The purpose of the magazine was to give a voice and credibility to youth during a time of great social upheaval. While running Student, Richard started a mail-order business for records that transformed into a music store: Virgin Records.

Richard built an incredible community through this music store. Virgin was the first to offer listening stations that allowed you to listen to music before you buy. Young people would come to the store to hang out. That community built from the retail stores and Virgin Records—which signed up everyone from The Sex Pistols to Janet Jackson—led to the iconic V fest music festivals.

A missed flight en route to Puerto Rico led Richard to found Virgin Airlines. Music got him flying.

Why would anyone let a high school dropout-turned-music mogul who hangs out with Peter Tosh and Boy George be in charge of air travel and air safety? Richard’s intense focus on community-building built strong partnerships that created a rock-solid airline with passengers at the center. Nowhere did the brand become more essential than when he took on the toughest entrenched industry: starting a U.S. domestic airline.

How to Build a Startup: Lessons From Virgin America

His story shows the power of branding done right. When you earn a customer’s trust, you have it for life.

Richard’s intense focus on community-building built strong partnerships that created a rock-solid airline with passengers at the center.

Resources we love

• Why DTC Brands' Reliance on Social Ads Is Unsustainable: Learn why first-party data should be the focus. [Adweek]
• 5 Lessons DTC and Legacy Brands Can Learn from Each Other: Engage customers in the research phase, scale digital strategies, and more. [Ad Age]
• How to Define and Measure Paid, Owned and Earned Media: Explore share of voice, compare sentiment against your competitors, and learn other ways to measure success. [Brand Watch]
• Getting Brand Communities Right: Discover how Harley-Davidson avoided extinction by building a brand community. [Harvard Business Review]
• How I Built This with Guy Raz featuring Richard Branson: This 30-minute podcast covering Branson’s successes—and failures—is worth a listen. [Guy Raz podcast]
• The Power of Pride at Facebook: Wharton professor Adam Grant teamed up with Facebook’s HR department and found that optimism, mission, and social good are key to taking pride in the company. [Fast Company]
• Why We Need to Rethink “Employer Brand”: Here’s why a talent framework should be embedded in the business and not just left to HR. [Harvard Business Review]
• Understanding and Developing Organizational Culture: Learn what metrics can help you assess organizational culture. [SHRM]
• What Trader Joe’s Figured Out About Work Culture That My Other Past Employers Haven’t: Autonomy and collaboration can go a long way. [Fast Company]

‍

Standing out with storytelling

Brand values, customer experience, storytelling, media relations, visual consistency: these are the pillars upon which successful brands are founded.The founder’s job is to build a community that is passionate about your products, and one of your most effective tools is storytelling.

• A consistent and inspiring story will be what new employees and investors will listen for when considering joining you in your journey.
• The story of your “why” will be expressed over and over again in everything you do—your LinkedIn page to recruit and select top talent; investor presentations, packaging, partner pitches and ongoing communication; and your consumer-facing website and social media channels.
• Keep your story crisp, compelling and timely. After all, we’re in a crowded information landscape, and you’ll need to repeat and reinforce stories that are relevant and interesting with each telling.
• Preparation is everything. With practice and feedback from your team, you will know how to prepare for and shine in each medium (audio, live, recorded, in person).

Resources we love

When to Hire a Public Relations Agency for Your Startup

‍

Exploring content marketing

Your website and social media channels are important owned distribution channels that are in your control. In a world of memes, chatter, and cancel culture, identifying channels that can amplify your brand stories will be important. And that requires a content plan for your channels. Each channel connects you with future employees, customers, and partners.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is all about creating and promoting valuable, relevant, consistent content to attract a clearly defined audience.

A consistent content plan helps establish credibility and trust and can build an audience for your channels. Here are some considerations for content:

• Identify someone on your team to build your channels. Who on your team is active on social media, passionate about what’s going on in the business, and can write or produce content quickly? At first, it may be you, but look to identify someone who can devote time and energy to create, listen, engage, and repeat with stakeholders through content.
• Tell your story again and again and try different formats. Reinforcing your message and story is essential in a noisy media landscape. Audiences are getting information through social copy, audio, video, and text; test all of them until you find what works best for your story.
• Showcase your thought leadership. Sharing perspectives and insights in a consistent and helpful way will help you build an audience. You will be known for this expertise.
• Leverage your data. What does your data tell you? Has analysis of a certain piece of data led to pattern recognition or customer trends? Do you have access to illuminating data that help your community and media? Shape it in digestible ways.
• Listen to your customers. Listening is a key part of content. Understanding pain points and problems they are trying to solve are an open invitation to jump into the conversation.
• Champion your customers and brand partners. Share and repost customer and brand content to show support and encouragement and also publicly align with like-minded brands.
• Enlist credible micro influencers and experts. Seek out those who can help reinforce your product.

‍

Brand content can be deployed in different forms. Along with internal communications and earned media, here are a few product forms:

• Case studies, white papers, internal reports: Consider creating long-form writing that examines your positioning, tracks industry verticals, and offers market analysis.
• Keynote speeches, thought leadership, op-eds
• Digital events: Workshops on best practices specific to your company's expertise become ownable content. People have short attention spans and want quick access to short-form content like videos.
• Surveys: Collecting and sharing key data is great, but it’s even more effective to include a cogent narrative that unpacks the insight
  

Consider liberating yourself from long-form blogs and experiment with video, audio, microblogs, email newsletters, and other formats. Examples of effective content include:

• LinkedIn: A short-form post by a director of diversity shares helpful resources on race and allyship
• Instagram Stories: These updates offered centralized information about protests in New York City for Black Lives Matter
• Medium: This “Definitive Guide to Investing in Black Founders” is worth a close read.
• How to Drive Customer Acquisition with Paid, Owned & Earned Media

‍

Improving internal communications

Brand building starts internally and as you live and breathe your values, the work expands to your customers. Every day your team is creating the building blocks of your company.

• Share stories about employees who have gone above and beyond and showcase examples of the teamwork that helped you overcome setbacks—and repeat these stories. These hero moments will contribute to your culture, and reinforce your brand values.
• Listen and learn from your team, and praise them for the behavior you want to see more of.
• Codify internal communications practices as your team expands.

‍

Creating consistent brand elements

Visual assets and storytelling should all work hard to articulate and connect your vision and development work with the intended customer. If you can’t show how your product benefits their lives, tell that story in a compelling way. You and your team’s background, track records, and story are useful tools to build trust and confidence.

As you begin to communicate your story and purpose, ask yourself: What assets can help support your storytelling, your investor presentations, and engagement with your owned media? That means preparing visual assets for your website and social media presence. It also means having a point of view on your storytelling, which comes across your talent recruitment materials, your customer service, internal communications, and owned and earned media.

Consistency is key. Your brand assets, storytelling, style sheet, talking points, and brand values all need to tell a unified story to your stakeholders. To offer a cohesive brand experience, here’s a checklist of the assets to align on:

• Brand mission and vision statements
• Voice and tone guidelines
• Logo, iconography, and color palette
• Fonts and typography
• Media formatting (for videos, social media, and images)

Spotlight: Glossier

The Glossier brand is recognizable by its soft pink and red branding, minimalist logo, and essentialist approach. “A key part of Glossier’s brand identity is simplicity,” reported Wired. “By January 2020, it had a total of 36 different products across skincare, makeup and fragrance—a minimalist offering by beauty brand standards. [Glossier founder Emily Weiss] says this is because Glossier aims to produce ‘hero’ or ‘best in kind’ products that are easy to use and become timeless essentials.”

Glossier’s emphasis on community, consistency across online and offline touch points, and brand storytelling led to a company valuation of $1.2 billion at the end of 2019.

Resources we love

• 5 Steps for Making Your Brand Identity More Consistent: Learn how to leverage a brand guide. [Entrepreneur]
• The Art of a Consistent Brand Image: From choosing colors to a typeface for your brand, get inspired with these examples. [Canva]

‍

Delivering a great customer experience

Customer experience is one of the most essential but underrated ways to build brand loyalty. According to American Express, 90% of Americans decide whether or not to do business with a company solely on the strength of that company’s customer service.

“Be it customer service, product quality, or just the way the customers feel about the companies they do business with, customer experience rises to the top of whether or not the customer will decide to keep doing business with a brand,” according to Forbes.

When your purpose, values, and product are aligned, delivering great customer experience is natural. As you build your brand, think about how your customer experiences echo your brand values.

• Create unified customer records: A customer will reach out to your company via so many different channels: phone, chat, email, social, a retail partner, and more. Their interaction history, questions, and data need to be stored in one place for a seamless experience regardless of channel. This enables your team to build long-term relationships each and every time you interact with a customer.
• Make customer experience part of every employee’s role: Most people don’t care which department they speak to when they have a problem or question about your product. Your company is one big team. Each member should be equipped to uphold your brand promise and work to help a customer get what they need.
• Surprise and delight: What are perks you can introduce that customers did not know they needed? Virgin Atlantic was the first airline to introduce seatback entertainment screens. Virgin Atlantic’s meal-service salt and pepper shakers were shaped like airplanes and so cute that passengers took them home. Instead of replacing them with cheaper and utilitarian envelope packs, the airline instead encouraged the customer behavior and etched on the bottom of each shaker, “Pinched from Virgin Atlantic.”
• Consistency is key: It’s frustrating for customers trying to resolve an issue to go in circles talking to different people. “There could be conflicting information and explanations,” notes one Forbes article. “That leads to confusion, and often a loss of confidence. Ultimately, that can lead to lost business.”

When your purpose, values, and product are aligned, delivering great customer experience is natural.
Christine Choi

Spotlight: Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe’s customers are fans for life. The grocery chain regularly ranks best in customer experience and top customer satisfaction, and their products are only part of the reason why. Trader Joe’s focuses on employee engagement and satisfaction. Workers at Trader Joe’s are happy to be there, and that happiness is contagious. The store doesn’t offer sales, rewards, or coupons—but they do simplify the shopping experience, giving customers exactly what they want. And, perhaps most importantly, the store listens actively to customer requests.

“When customers complained that the store used too much plastic packaging, especially with its produce, Trader Joe’s announced it would start packaging items in more eco-friendly packaging and stop offering single-use plastic bags,” reported Forbes. “Stores have also changed their hours and products based on feedback from customers, which can easily be given online or in store.”

Resources we love

• Six Ways to Build Your Brand Through Customer Service: Here’s how aligning customer service and your brand can create a competitive advantage. [Harvard Business Review]
• The 10 Brands with the Best Customer Service Aren't Who You'd Expect: From Disney Cruise Line to Cracker Barrel, these brands delivered on five key elements of customer service. [SAP Customer Experience]
• Beyond Cookie Butter: the Secrets of Trader Joe’s Customer Experience: According to this Repeat Customer podcast, a marketing executive got a job bagging groceries at Trader Joe’s to learn the company’s customer experience secrets. [Zendesk]
  
  

Case study: Daily Harvest

Daily Harvest offers a master class in great branding. The company sells frozen superfood meals and smoothies for delivery. From Day One, their brand has considered its product from the customer’s point of view. Daily Harvest is reimagining what easy, healthy food could look like—not the typical frozen meals that you find in the grocery aisle, loaded with sodium and other scary, artificial ingredients.

• Daily Harvest’s purpose—“we take care of food so food can take care of you”—is infused in everything they do. As a customer champion, Daily Harvest’s brand promise is to provide clean, organic nutritious meals.
• The company is also an inventory champion. They’re intentional about who they source from and transparent about the farmers they partner with. When the community asked for sustainable packaging, Daily Harvest invested in compostable containers—despite the financial hit to its margins. It’s these details that build community and show the brand puts the customer first.
• Daily Harvest’s visual branding is minimal, clean, and beautiful. It aligns with the promise of healthy eating made simple. You won’t see lots of distracting colors, shapes, or fonts. Their social media color palette relies on white backgrounds with visual pop coming from healthy vegetables and fruit. This is a far cry from the typical frozen food packaging you find in the grocery store.
• Daily Harvest has been intentional about its brand ambassadors. In 2019, 23% of traffic on Daily Harvest’s site came from YouTube. Daily Harvest has worked with vegan and healthy-eating micro-influencers to gain credibility in this category they’ve created for themselves: healthy frozen meals. The brand regularly runs Instagram takeovers with influencers and other brands to build consumer trust. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic—when the brand faced an explosion of demand—Daily Harvest expanded its list of suppliers to never miss a meal.

‍

Takeaways & next steps

Today’s customers are savvier and the marketplace is more competitive than ever. Customers can readily differentiate between companies looking to make a quick buck, and those that care about them.

Brand is everything when it comes to building trust. It’s important that founders take the time to go through the exercise of defining why your brand exists, how it helps a community, and then articulate that story in a compelling way.