Transcripts
1. Welcome: Hi. My name is Chris Fredricks. I'm a graphic designer and educator with a focus on building and managing brands. I currently am a visiting professor at Grand Valley State University here in Michigan, and also an adjunct at Kendall College of Art and Design. When I work with clients, I typically go through a three part process with brand strategy. Step one is, find your focus. So, figuring out what makes you the most different compared to your competition. Step two is, find your voice. So, figuring out the personality of your brand and how you talk to your customer, and that's what we're going to tackle today. Step three, keep it consistent. So, once you know your focus, once you know your voice, how do you keep that consistent across everything that you put out into the world? Today's class is, Find Your Voice. So, once you know your focus and what makes you the most different compared to your competition, the next step is figuring out how you tell that story, and the voice that you're tell it in. So, the personality of your brand or the personality your company. This class is done in a workshop style and there are worksheets that you can follow along with. If you don't have a way to print that out right now, don't worry about it, just grab a notepad and a pen so you can make notes along the way. These could consist of a variety of exercises that I've found along the way using with clients and using with students on branding projects. They're just a mash-up of the things that I found that work best.
2. Project: We're going to go through four steps. We're going to talk about your brand archetype, which I think is probably the most fun exercise, which is why I start with it. We're going to find your personality, figuring out personality traits that you have as a brand. We're going to talk about your competition. Then, we're going to explore your voice through practicing writing of headlines, or social media posts, or whatever you want to practice writing. But brainstorming, working through this stuff, getting the bad stuff out of your head, so you get to the good stuff, I encourage that all the time and that is one of my focuses as a brand strategist. So, the goal of all of this, is to define your voice, be consistent and build that trust. That is what customers are looking for. They're looking for people like Seth Godin says, "They connect with their world view." So, you can have that opinion, you can connect to their worldview. But if you're not saying the right way, you're not saying it the way they would say it, then, it's going to be hard to make that connection. So, you're taking that focus that you figured out in class one and you're bringing even more clarity to it, creating in even more focused brand. So, like in all my classes, I include this worksheet and I hope by the end of the class you have at least notes written on the side so you can go back through this again and you can fill in the blanks, refine things, narrow down the focus of things. At the end, you just put all these together and that becomes your brand book. How much you formalize that, is totally up to you. You can make it a real slick, fully designed brand book and style guide, or you can to just have that handwritten book to share with people. So, don't worry about what it looks like, really it's just the content inside that's valuable. So, grab a pad of paper and a pen, or download these worksheets and follow along. We'll talk about things that you do say, things that you don't say and I'll encourage you to look into what your competition is saying. To demonstrate this workshop process, I'm going to use an example of my own, which is a company that I am in the process of starting up called By Fred. By Fred is going to be in apparel printing and fulfillment service, as well as an apparel brand. So, it's a company with two parts that are going to be working, but the personality of both those parts is going to be similar. I've definitely thought about it a little bit, but I have not gone through this process for By Fred yet, because it's open for business, but not to the whole world quite yet. So, the message has not been fully formed yet. I'm in the process of doing that and I'm going to take this class as an opportunity to work through it today while at the same time giving you a real life example of how this process can work.
3. What is Branding?: So, what is branding? Is it just the logo? Is it your web site? Is it the story you're telling? As Marty Neumier says in the book The Brand Gap, which is a book I talk about all the time. He says, "It's not what you say you are, it's what they say you are." He also says, "A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or organization." Keywords there are gut feeling. What does that mean? It really what it's all about, it's about perception. It's about how you're perceived in the marketplace. So, if you're a new brand, a new company, you don't really have a brand. You don't have a brand until there's people that are aware that you exist and there's people that are starting to have feelings about what you're putting out into the world. You can see how if you don't have a very clear focus as a company and you don't have a very clear voice or you have a voice that changes all the time, you can see how that can create a messy perception, or maybe not the perception that you're going for. A company that looks chaotic or sounds chaotic when they're trying to talk about themselves, is not a company a lot of people are going to trust. So, how do you control a brand? Again, the three steps that I go through are: Find your focus. Example I give for that all the time is, I do a lot of art markets because I screen print apparel, and I meet a lot of people and I've a lot of friends who make things with their hands. That's a focus, being a handmade artisan, that's something that sets you apart among other people. I can buy jeans at Wall Mart or I can buy jeans from a guy I know, that sets him apart. Obviously, there's a price difference as well, but it depends what's important to that customer. Next is find your voice, which is what we're talking about today. So, I use MailChimp a lot as an example for this because I think they have a really clear brand voice. They work in an industry that's boring. Like if you think about email and newsletters, if you've looked at any of MailChimps competition, it's very corporate, it's very business like, it's very not exciting to deal with, and it's very technical. MailChimp cheers you while you're along the way, which is an unusual thing to find, I think in the business world in general. You can high five your computer screen if you want. Then, the third step is keep it consistent. So, in the corporate world, that might look like a brand book or a style guide, something where all of the rules for your brand are in a printed format or a digital format that you can distribute to anyone that needs it. For a solo operation for a small company, that's everything from how consistent the imagery on your Instagram page is to how that compares to your web site, all of your other social media pages, your business cards, keeping it consistent across whatever it is that you're putting out into the world. Why brand first? Branding is a guide, it gives you guidance along the way. Having these brand books whether it's a fancy corporate one or a handwritten one that you're working on today, it becomes your path as a company. It shows you the way when you are marketing, it shows you the way when you're working with other people like graphic designers. Brand strategy becomes the outline for everything that you do. So, all of those things I talked about before, all your touch points, that strategy that you have documented and formalized, that becomes your guide for putting all these things out into the world. The goal of branding overall, is one; to create that consistency, step three in our process, and that consistency becomes authenticity, and that authenticity becomes trust. That trust comes from knowing what your focus is, saying it in a consistent voice and doing that forever. As soon as you stray from that, that's when trust gets a little murky. You see companies all the time in trouble because they said something wrong, they did something wrong they did something that didn't line up with what their values were perceived to be. That's when a company fails.
4. Brand Archetype: What I love about brand archetype is it connects your brand to something everyone is familiar with. When you look through the archetypes, you can see that these characters exist in every movie that you've ever watched, musicians that you like, any book you've ever read. The main characters, the protagonist, the villains, they're all an archetype of some sort. There's this big book called The Hero and The Outlaw. I don't recommend reading all the way through it. You can think of it as a reference book, which is why I have various Post-it notes throughout. This list out all the different archetypes and it explains them in detail, a lot of detail, thick book. You can explore further and learn more about what that archetype is by looking through this book or you can find all this info online for zero dollars. You're going to go through this work sheet and you're going to look for the one your brand most connects with. Your brand or you, if it's just you. In the work sheet all I'm sharing with you is the goal or method. The reason I'm doing that is because of maybe too much information, it's going to take you forever and I like to make things quick and simple whenever possible. So, just go through these cross out the ones you are not and then go through them again and try to cross out more. It's really hard for a lot of people to come up with just one, but try your hardest to do that. If you narrow it down to two that's okay. Also, once you get into diving deeper into these, you might figure out that you're more one than the other or you might take a couple pieces from each. All right. I'm going to go through the archetypes for my business by Fred. I'm trying to figure out what I'm. What I'm doing is I'm just quickly reading over that goal or method and I'm going to cross out the ones that I don't think fit with my company, or explore to learn what's constant in life we're always changing environment. I'm not going to read them all because I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what I'm because I think it fits in with other companies that I've started and that are currently run at the moment. It's based a lot on my own personality and you'll find that to be the case often when you are starting a company on your own. A lot of times that personality comes from you, so it makes it pretty easy to define in this case. Could be kind of a connector because I'm trying to make things happen with other people. I'd like to think I'm an artist, but this is really about the service of printing shirts for other people I cross these out. I think I really I'm going to end up falling into everyman here. To talk about in one second. I'm going to go with everyman for me. Again, if you have two, three whatever, dive into the further definitions of what these archetypes mean and that will help you clarify. You can pick traits from certain ones and call them whatever you want to call them. Because really it's just about you understanding your brand a little bit better. You don't have to just pick one but try to, try to pick a main one at least. The goal or method for an everyman, is to bond with others by being humble hardworking and friendly. I'm really starting a service based company and I'm also going to go out into the world and find brands that I respect that aren't currently selling merchandise and I'm going to try to get them on board with selling that merchandise. I think I do that just by being like really straightforward really honest with what I do and the fact that I have knowledge of how to build brands, how to run brands, how to manage brands then I can help them understand and feel comfortable. Once you have an archetype picked out, you can dive into this big old book that I mentioned before or you can figure this out. There's lots of resources on the Internet, I posted a link on the project's page that you can check out yourself as well. I'm going to look up everyman in here and one thing you'll find out online, they'll call them different things. In this one they call it regular guy or girl. That sounds very old timey. In this case we have, what I'm looking at is the core desires, the goals, the fears et cetera. Core desire for everyman is connection with others. The goal is to belong fit in. Fears are standing out seeming to put on airs and being exiled or rejected as a result. My strategy is develop ordinary solid virtues the common touch. My trap is give up self to blend in, in exchange for only a superficial connection. My gift is realism, empathy, lack of pretense. I'm going to pull out the things that I think fit with my brand. I do want to fit in. I don't fear standing out though, which is one thing. I think what it really comes down to is the core desire which is also in that goal and method is that I want to connect with others. That's a big one for me. Also I like the strategy, I want to develop solid virtues and have a common touch I want to make people comfortable and I want people to like me. That's how it goes. As you can see, there's pages and pages by person. Pages and pages of information on the everyman in this book and you can find really thorough descriptions online as well.
5. Personality Slider: Next up we're going to try to further define your personality, and we're going to use a few different tools to do that. These next two things come from Google Ventures three hour brand Sprint which is similar to this class kind of a mash up of tools that they found that worked when they were trying to develop brands quickly for the various companies that Google buys up and then tries to develop further. So, I like this one it's quick, it gives you kind of like a quick definition of kind of personality traits for your brand, kind of where you fit into the world. So, you can see on this Google Venture version they have different brands on each side of the scale. All you're doing is you're placing a point on each one of those things where you think you fit best. So, it's fine like I said if you have a couple that end up in the middle but try to have one or two maybe even three that kind of go out to the edge. So, you're a little bit stronger in a couple spots, which makes your brand a little bit more refined and a little, it kind of means that there's a little bit more personality, where if you're in the middle of all of those things you're obviously not a super exciting brand. We want to be at least kind of exciting most of the time. So, first one Elite, Mass appeal. So again, when I was describing a business I was talking about how I'm going to go out and I'm going to find brands that are established, brands that I think can actually sell merchandise. I don't want to help people that I don't think are going to be successful because that doesn't work out for them and it doesn't work out for me. So, I think I lean a little bit towards the Elite side of things even with the apparel line, I think I'm going to end up creating stuff that it's probably cost a little bit more money than something that you can find it like a Target or Walmart. Yeah, It is on a higher quality shirt, it's higher quality product cost a little bit more money so, a little bit more Elite. Next up, we have Playful or Serious. So, on this one I think I lean more towards the Google as being a playful company and probably excessively so. So, on this one the examples are showing Palantir like data analytics sounds boring. I would probably find it boring, I'm sure the people that work there think it's great. Then the other side is Google. So kind of, again giving you an idea kind of giving you some sort of frame of reference. I think I'm playful there. Next up, Conventional or Rebel, they give you Hyundai or Tesla as examples some car companies. Again, I think I lean towards rebellious, what I'm doing is not like new or necessarily super exciting. I'm going to do it in a more selective way though. So, which I think is kind of rebellious, a lot of people are like, "I want everyone to be my customers come to me, have your shirts printed." Whereas I'm going to go kind of handpicked people to build a higher quality brand. All right. Next up Friend or Authority, I'm going to say that I'm a Friend. Again, this is where you'll see that connection to that the archetype come in again. So, that every man wants people to like them is humble, like a nice person hopefully, hopefully you think. Do you think I'm a nice person? Be honest. So, yeah, I lean more towards Friend going to be a Friend. Then next up, Mature and Classic and Young and Innovative. I've done a bunch of workshops like this in real life and all of people don't like the Young or Mature part. So, if that throws you off, feel free to just cross it out. I think you can be Mature and Innovative, I think Tesla is a company that has like a mature kind of attitude, they're not like joking around all the time, they do serious stuff but they're obviously innovative. So, they'll be thrown off by those words, if you don't like them ignore them, do your own thing. So, I think this is who I am, I think I lean pretty heavily towards one side on most of these, I think this is what by a Friend is going to be though. So, a little bit Elite, Very Playful, rebellious, Friendly, Innovative by friend. So, go through and do that same thing for yourself. Let's move on to the next one.
6. Competitive Landscape: Next up, we're going to dive into your competition a little bit. Looking into what they're saying, what they're talking about, and then put them on a chart to see what their personality looks like, if you chart it out. Then we'll check out where you fit in with that landscape. Is your personality different or similar to theirs? Don't feel like you has to be completely different. There's nothing wrong with emulating a brand that you think is successful, but sometimes you will, sometimes you'll treat yourself somewhere completely different, and that's kind of cool too, because you then kind of like creating your own path in the industry. But again, don't put pressure on yourself to be like the complete opposite of your competition, in this case of personality. You're going to want to think up a few competitors. Hopefully, you already know some. If you've been in the industry for a while, you probably do. If you're new to the industry, do a little bit of research and dig up a few names at least. The more the merrier. It doesn't really matter, but have a few to lay out on this chart and then compare yourself to them. So what we're doing is, we have a scale from expressive to reserved, one direction, and then we have classic to modern. What we're going to do is basically put a little pin, where we think our competitors are. Then, when we're done with that, we're going to see where we fit in, or maybe where we want to fit in, or where we can fit in, or where we feel comfortable. So I do have a few competitors of mine. A couple of them are big, couple of them are smaller. I'm going to show you a few of those real quick. So first of all, there's a company called Threadless. Threadless is a huge company. They kind of got their start by crowdsourcing designs, by having like a community of designers who would compete to have their designs printed. They get paid for the designs and then, Threadless sells the shirts. So on the thing they're doing now, though is you can actually, anyone can upload a design and start basically a web store, where they fulfill the order as it comes in. So like a print on demand service, they're using to direct to garment printers. Which is what I'm doing as well, but I'm not going to do it for everyone. So it's a little different but, so their style, their shirts are usually trendy, print on high quality shirts, which I will do as well. Yeah, and they support artists. So, they're cool, like what they're doing is cool. I also recommend checking out things like their Facebook pages, their social media pages. What they're doing basically, is like showcasing the artwork that's on their t-shirts, I'm talking about it. Sometimes, it's silly, see those reference, that's fun. Sometimes, it is like some retro cool design, just like something that looks good on a t-shirt and they say nothing about it. They're not too hard to map out. I would call them, somewhere up in like the expressive and modern side of things. So probably right around here. That's going to give them a little mark and then, I'm going to write Threadless next to it. So I remember who's there. So next up, an even bigger player in the game of merchandise. Amazon, recently got into this as well and a lot of times, I know you might be thinking like, "Oh, if Amazon does it, maybe it's not a good idea to start a small business that does the same thing." Well, again, Amazon is like it's going to be for everybody. So if you have ideas for designs that you want on shirts and you don't want to work with someone who's looking for established brands like myself, Amazon is who you go to. I'm not going to tell you use me. Amazon doesn't have like a super strong brand personality. I don't think they have a great focus. They're obviously huge and they can destroy anyone they would like, but then I have a strong personality. So I'm going to call them like very reserved and slightly classic. The technology they're using is new, so you could argue like not super classic, but t-shirts are t-shirts. They've been there forever, so Amazon Merch, right there. Another one that kind of like Amazon is emulating even more than the Threadless one, would be a company like CafePress. So CafePress is a company that should be worried that Amazon Merch is a thing now, because they do exactly the same thing, except the Amazon obviously has a much huger audience. It's close to St. Patrick's Day right now, so their whole website, whole main page is St. Patrick's Day. Almost their whole main page is St. Patrick's Day related. I'm not going to be that gimmicky. I'm not going to do every single holiday. It's cool if you love St. Patrick's Day. I'm not super into it, I'm just not going to make like several dozens St. Patrick's Day designs. That's a very kind of old school business model, I think in merchandise. So I'm going to throw them down here, to probably even more classic but a little less reserved than in Amazon. They have a personality. I just don't think it fits with mine. I'm not their customer. So CafePress, rather. Next up, I'm also going to have an apparel line and I've done a lot of research. I have an apparel line right now, called Grow Blossom, where I print minimal designs for kids and adults. So I'm using that method but then, creating a By Fred apparel line that is kind of like more mainstream, the less specific designs, whereas my existing apparel line is pretty specific to this things I very specifically like. So I'm going to think about these Etsy shops that I research. There's good ones and there's bad ones. There's ones that create original designs, print on a high quality shirts, more similar to myself, and then there are companies that kind of rip off other designs or just make things that are very trendy, right this second. I'm going to call them bad to trust. Doesn't mean they'll make money, you can be bad and make money. So, Good Etsy shop, I'm going to say is right about here. Good Etsy and the bad Etsy shop, I'm going to go, they might not be very reserved. They might actually be quite expressive, but very classic in their style. Again, printing bad quality shirts, not original designs. So that's where my competition is. I think that's most of my competition right there. Then I'm also going to call out myself. I think I fit more in with the Good Etsy and the Threadless guys. I'm going to try to be, even a tad more expressive though. A little bit more modern, maybe not off the charts like currently I'm showing it. So there we are, that's my final competitive landscape. So I can again, I can use that as a reference, can use the sliders before this as a reference. Pass that on to someone else who may have an idea of where we fit in with our competition.
7. Personality Traits: Next up, we're going to try to narrow down our personality to three main traits. The way I always recommend creating a list of three things we've done in our previous classes, is to brainstorm at times. So, start with brainstorming personality characteristics that you might use to describe your brand or your company. Then, once you have a list hopefully of 15, 20, 30, 40 depending on how aggressive you get with it, you just want to narrow it down to the top three. A lot of times what I end up doing is, I write the same thing 10 different ways. So, pick the one you like that sounds the best, and then give yourself a top three list. Usually, I like to rank things, so what's the one most important one, second, third, just to, again, to further focus your brand personality for yourself. So, once you have those three personality traits narrowed down, we're going to push it a little bit further. So, I might be straightforward, but I'm not mean. So, adding those just a few words afterwards to further define it will not only help you remember that, you probably won't need as much help remembering that, but helping anyone you employ in the future, that you work with in the future, understand what that message is supposed to sound like. But, I would love to not run my social media accounts because I don't have time for it and I don't really enjoy it. So, being able to hand this off to somebody else and explain this really quickly would make my life a lot easier. Let's start off by brainstorming real quick. Basically, think out loud as I go to give you an idea what I'm doing. So, one, I always go with for the companies I start is straightforward, I use simple language, I like to explain things as simply as possible, I want people to understand me, I want people to trust me. I think being straightforward is a way to do that, so it's something I value. Honest, I'm going to say that I'm funny even though that makes it sound I'm really full of myself. Funny, clever, always joking, what else, humble, again, I'm stealing that from my archetype, again, look into your archetype to see what the goal is there. Helpful, informative, like a teacher, explainer, simplifier, thinker, daydreamer, there's something to start with there. So, I'm going to pick my top three, I think my number one is straightforward, my number two, probably helpful in the past, I've been screen printing for about a decade, and I've gotten printing business in the past just by answering people's questions. A lot other printers don't want to be bothered with that, they want people who have a design ready to go. Notice by being helpful, I've gotten a lot of work. What else? Thinker slash brainstormer. Again, that's a part of the brand strategy side of me, I'm always brainstorming for clients, I'm always brainstorming along with my students for their projects. I like helping people figure things out, helping people figure out how they can grow their businesses, better explain, better tell their story, etc. Once you have these top three, the next thing I want you to do is to expand on them a little bit. One common way of doing that is just to add a few words to further explain it, or to further define or narrow that personality trait down. So, I might say straightforward, but not mean, sometimes people think straightforward means mean, I don't mean I'm going to be brutally honest to the point where I'm blunt and offensive, but I'm straightforward, again, like simplifying things, trying to help you out. Helpful like always providing information. Willing to teach someone, and then thinker, brainstormer, I'm going to say, helping people solve problems. Yeah. So, I'm straightforward but not mean, I'm helpful, always providing information, and willing to teach someone, I'm a thinker and a brainstormer, helping people solve their problems. That's what by Fred I want by Fred to be, I want by Fred to be a way to simplify the process of creating a product and selling it to the world. So, those are my personality traits and I've expanded them a little bit, and again, work on that brainstorming, brainstorm as much as you can, pause for a second whenever you need to in this video, and then narrow it down to three. Expand on a little bit more, keep going. Any questions feel free to ask.
8. Brand Voice Chart: Next up is the brand voice chart. So, you're going to take those three characteristics that you already had, you're next going to add a description, then you're going to think about, how do you talk when it comes to that characteristic. So, describe how you talk. Then next up how don't you talk. So, just again, a short description of how you don't talk. The goal of this is, this is kind of like a really straightforward guide for yourself and future employees. So, you can just hand this to somebody, they can handle your social media account. You can go on a vacation. Hopefully, someday we can both afford. You can always revise these as you need it. So don't feel like these are set in stone. Business changes, the focus of your business changes, the employees change the way you're doing business changes. Change it up, just revise things if you need to. I included an example on the first line here of my first one which was straightforward. So, what we're going to do is we're going to describe it. So honest, speaking in plain language, not overcomplicating things, but also friendly is my description for straight forward. What we do is we use plain language that gets to the point, not over emphasising or over using buzz words, and we use real examples. So, we're telling real stories. We don't do is use technical words or over-explain, and we don't type. We don't talk hypothetically. The next trait was helpful. So, if I was to describe that real quick I might say, so always willing to explain things and provide info. So I was willing to explain things and provide info would be my description there. Maybe also teaching. Then, what do we do. We show through pictures our process and we explain it. We don't assume people know everything about what we do. Well, when you're explaining things, we don't want to treat people like they're dumb. We're not acting like we are super special. Again, going back to the archetype, we want to be helpful. But we also want to be humble. So we are not like, "Come to us for all the knowledge you ever need to know about apparel." It's not like that. So helpful, also humble. So, I think that's good. That's a good place to be. My next trait was thinker brainstormer. So, thinker brainstormer. We like to think through problems, often out loud. Like right now and with others. So like trying to create a community around that kind of a problem solving thing. I think that's how I end up finding clients or find people that feel like this is a problem. They need, they know they could sell shirts if they had them but they don't want to go through that process of doing it. So, we're kind of simplifying it, we're thinking and brainstorming how we can simplify that process for them. So, the things we do say, I think a lot of it is sharing. We share a process. So, now unlike the do above, we're thinking brainstorming process. We're showing what we're thinking about, showing how we get there. What we don't do, let's say, we don't necessarily share work that's bad, or that we're not proud of. So, take some time to go through this brand voice chart and think about those three characteristics that you define. Add more if you want to, and then describe it, pinpoint what you do say, pinpoint what you don't say and share, and just keep working through it. Again, if you have any questions or if you need help figuring that out, post them in the comments. Let's talk about it. Happy to help.
9. Writing & Brainstorming: The next step is, start writing. Take these things into consideration that we just talked about that we just worked on in brainstorm phrases, brainstorm really simple campaigns that you might do to get people's attention, to start spreading your focus. Again, go back and look at what your competition is saying, and always have your focus in mind when you're writing these things. Think about a few different things here. So, what does your customer want to hear from you? This is something again, you work out when you're figuring out what makes you the most different, what your customer wants. Think about what role you can play, fit into their worldview. So, a lot of times people are, what do I post about? What do I post about? I think there's a few different ways. I think there's two main things you can do. Can you educate, can you educate people on something that they want to know more about? Or you can entertain people, you can show them cool pictures, show them cool graphics you're working on. I can show them cool shirts that I'm printing for people, I can educate them by showing them how the printing process works, how easy it is to order a T-shirt, how easy it is to have a T-shirt printed for them. So again, education, entertainment, there's real people making these things so there's always a story to tell there. You don't have to necessarily write complete headlines, but I would brainstorm the content that you plan on sharing. If you have some of that content, then I would start writing headlines for it, or social media posts for it. So, for example, a lot of my content is going to be based on apparel that I'm producing at the time. So, I don't have those pictures right now, but I do have examples of apparel that I've produced before, and I can think about headlines that might go with that. I could also think about, what am I going to say to a potential brand that I want to work with? What am I going to show them visually? I might not just be making social media posts, I might be making actual brochures, very old school of me, something to hand or leave behind when I leave a meeting with somebody. So, I'm going to think through all of those things. So, one thing I know and I don't even need to write it down really, but a lot of it is like how I'm going to talk to my customers on social media for example. I'm always going to start with, hey, check out this new shirt dot, dot, dot. Casual. It's not always going to start with hey, but it'll be like hey, or check out this, something where it's how I would talk to my friends. Again, I'm creating this every man like humble, straightforward, friendly company so, I'm not going to talk in a very corporate way, I'm not going to ever call my clients clients on social media. I'm going to say, hey we printed this new shirt for my friend Stav. I do have a friend named Stav, he's a comedian and I print shirts for him. So, for outside brands that I'm trying to work with, here I'm just talking about the kind of content I'm going to share with them. I'm going to tell them stories about brands I've worked with before and again, the tone is going to be casual and I'm going to talk about results. So, I know that sounds very corporate, like motivational business talk. I'm not going give them sales numbers, I'm just going to be, I'm going to use my friend Stav again. I have a friend named Stav, he's a comedian who I print shirts for and so he doesn't have the time to print shirts because he's busy writing, doing stand up comedy, working in television, all these other random things. So, he has no time to source designs, figure out a screen printer. He knew me, he asked me, he doesn't want to ship out shirts. So, I'm going to tell Stav's story to other people that are like Stav, I'm going to share stories that are relevant to that person. So, relevant to my customers. So, stories that are relevant to my customers. I'm going to show photos of process like we talked about before. We're also going to educate about how printing process works, how quickly people can get things. I'm also going to talk about the environment. I'm going to offer organic options from a shirt higher quality options, I'm going to talk about the environment, I'm going to talk about working conditions. When I order shirts, I make sure they're not made in sweatshops because that matters to me. I'm going to offer U.S.A made stuff. I care about where things come from, I'm going to share that story as well. So, you can start to just list out these things, these general themes, these general ideas, that general tone of, hey check this out, or this is cool, or did you know this is how to print a shirt. So, just really simply explaining things, and then also the type of content I'm going to talk about,. Some of that stuff, a lot of that stuff is coming from my previous class, Find Your Focus, where you're figuring out what makes you different and figuring out what your values are as a company. A lot of that content can come from that. A lot of what you're sharing is your focus, so I'm going to show you one more thing real quick. This is a very temporary website I made real fast. There's no visual consistency to it, except that it's boring. This is something I really quickly wrote up that really quickly summarizes my focus as a brand, or my differentiating factor. So, it shouldn't be hard to launch a product line. We work with people we believe in and help them create, sell, and fulfill orders. So again, I am an every man, I like to simplify things, that is a very simple description of how I'm going to help you, and how I'm only going to help people I believe in and care about, and how we can make it work and make it easy for the customer. Even though I hadn't explored voice or tone yet, I think that does a pretty good job of sharing that voice that we've come to at the end of this, and showing how it could be applied to an actual headline on a website. So, I think that's really good, I think it's pretty solid. Then another example of a headline I wrote, getting merch made is harder than it needs to be. I'm stating the problem that currently exists in the industry, and then down here I really quickly explain how I'm going to solve. Once you have this worksheet filled out, all these things, I'd go through it again and I would really fill up pages of stuff with ideas for headlines. If you know what you're selling, you know your focus, you have content like photos that you're going to share, what's the caption on that photo? What's the rest of that social media posts look like? Start doing that stuff, share it with us, post it down below, it'll be awesome and we'll help each other out. The goal of all of this again, is that you can further explain your focus in a clear and consistent brand voice, sharing that personality but sometimes it's just your personality like I mentioned before, if you're a small business, or it might be a bigger corporate personality that you're developing. Once you're done with that, the next step is keeping it consistent, and we will tackle that in the next class, and I hope you watch it, and I hope you enjoy this, and I hope it was helpful. Again, please share any of the questions you have, share your progress. If you don't make it all the way through, tell us about it so we can help you out. I love doing this, and I love helping people brainstorm. Thanks a lot. Good luck.
