Insights
Finding your voice
We're talking about information overload. From AI slop and doom scrolling to rage baiting, the world is full, maybe overflowing with information and opinions.
In this soup of content, organisations of all kinds are finding they increasingly need to demonstrate what they stand for and differentiate their messaging. More than ever, finding your voice is a priority.
And we’re no different. After 23 years of communicating to make the world a better place, we recently sat back and said to ourselves that classic workshop question “what do we stand for?” What followed was a whole series of questions, debates and challenges which brought our team together to map out our future direction. What’s so interesting for us was realising how much harder it is to hold the mirror up to ourselves rather than our clients. We’ll soon be launching our new website to share our new thinking and approach, but here we wanted to share some of the techniques and lessons we’ve learnt over 20 years of helping organisations find their own voice.
Here are our five key takeaways.
Do the Tippex test
If you’re looking to find messaging or a proposition that stands out from your competitors, try the Tippex test. We’d recommend taking five of your closest competitors or comparators and take their top-line description of what they do, include your organisation and your current descriptor in this mix too. Now, ask your project team to match the organisation to the description. Be sure to remove any brand identifiers. What you might find is how similar the propositions are and where the points of difference are. It’s a great way to start on the journey of finding something fresh and distinctive to build your new brand proposition around.
Involve your friends and your critics
It’s very easy when you are trying to define and agree a new brand proposition to only ask your friendly contacts or in-house team. Involving friendly contacts is a great start but approaching a few critics or colder audiences for their thoughts can be even more useful. Getting a new proposition right is a vitally important part of building a stronger, more successful brand and gaining insights from multiple audiences can really shape and improve the end result.
Be true but stretch yourselves
One thing we’ve learned from working with many charities and organisations is a new brand proposition, narrative or vision must be grounded in truth. It’s great to be ambitious and to stretch yourselves but it needs to be authentic, reflect your reality and you need the evidence or examples to back it up. Be bold, be direct but ensure you can live up to your new direction of travel.
Does it work practically?
Make sure you test before you launch! One simple test for your new proposition is to do some simple, practical tests. Try reading out your new proposition in a team meeting, how does it feel, does it land the way you expected? Explain it to a friend to describe what you do at work, does it feel right? Try it in a meeting with new people, do you feel they understood what you stand for as a result? Critically, a brand narrative or proposition needs to work when spoken, as well as when written. If it passes the verbal and written test, you are more likely onto a winner.
Enjoy the process, it’s a unique moment
Finally enjoy it! We’re often asked, what’s special or different about your approach to branding, visioning or strategy? Our answer is, you’ll enjoy the process and be delighted with the end result. "If you lose the joy, you lose the quality" is our motto.
Over the past year we have helped charities, campaigning organisations, universities, colleges and government organisations find their voice and reboot their brand. If you’re looking for support to devise your new vision, a refreshed brand narrative or just to update how you describe who you are and what you do, please drop us a line. We absolutely love working collaboratively with our clients on this type of project.
