Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Brand messaging has become vital in connecting and
relating to audience. Internal stakeholders are the
group that will really be representing the brand and
executing the brand messaging. It's important for there
to be a process that helps internal stakeholders to really embrace and adopt the
brand voice of a company. Hello. I'm Liz, a brand
strategist and designer. In 2018, I started
Ostara Studio, a consultancy to
help clients build, voice, and amplify
their brand stories. In this class, I'll be
offering some tips for internal stakeholders
to adopt and embrace their
company's brand voice. Firstly, I will show
you how you can access and understand the
brand and the brand voice. Then I'll take you through a
process where you will learn your own values and
role within that brand. Then I'll take you
through aligning internal branding and marketing, to ensure that the brand
voice is coming through. By the end of this class, I would like you to feel empowered in your
own value and role, in your company's brand. If you are a leader, I would like you to have the
easy process that you can use with your team to help them adopt the company's brand. You will have access to
the workshopping sheet to help you align internal
and external branding. I encourage you to
upload your version in the project gallery
for feedback from me. You're also welcome
to engage with me and ask me any questions
in the discussion section. I look forward to seeing
you in the next lesson. [MUSIC]
2. Accessing Brand Identity Guidelines : In this lesson, we
will go through accessing the brand
identity guidelines. For internal stakeholders to understand and adopt
a brand voice, they first need to have access
to some form of the brand. Genuinely a brand
is accessed through a brand identity guideline
document or brand style guide. This brand guide covers
elements like; vision, purpose, values, personality,
tagline, mantra, and visual and verbal language. These are all elements that influence the brand's messaging. In this lesson,
I'll be showing you National Geographic's
brand guidelines. As you can see, it's not only focused
on the visual identity, it also considers National
Geographic's mission, their purpose, goals, values. The brand focuses
on being premium. It focuses on science, adventure, exploration,
and destination. It also has messages specific for the
internal stakeholders. To consider for this
lesson is whether the internal stakeholders have
access to the brand guide. Is training offered during the recruitment
process on the brand? Do internal stakeholders
have access to a brand guide like this
through the internal Intranet? Encourage internal
stakeholders to have a look at those elements
like the vision, values, and purpose
of a company. Your student action for this lesson is to go and
see if you have access to your company's brand guide and take note of
anything you might not have noticed
before when it's come to your company's
brand voice.
3. Knowing the Vision, Purpose & Values: Now that you have access to
your brand's guidelines, it is important to look
at the elements within the brand guidelines that
influence the brand voice. In this lesson, we will look specifically at vision,
purpose, and values. The brand vision of a company is the company's purpose as
it relates to the future. It asks questions like what the company
wants to achieve in the future and how it wants to contribute to the greater world. It's a great way for
internal stakeholders to connect to the company
and what they stand for. It offers inspiration. Similarly, the brand purpose is the company's reason
for existing. It can offer motivation for internal stakeholders to
know what the company does. The values of the company
is how the company implements the vision
and the purpose. These are traits really that the internal
stakeholders can embody. They can represent the brand
voice by using these values. For the example of this lesson, I will refer to Warby Parker, who really illustrate vision, purpose, and values quite well. Warby Parker's mission statement
is to offer designer eye at a revolutionary
price while leading the way for socially
conscious businesses. This is their purpose and
their reason for existing. Their values are: empathetic
customer treatment, respect and growth
for employees, serving the community,
kindness to the environment. From these values,
it is apparent that their priority are stakeholders whether it's the community, their staff or the environment. Their purpose and values make sense when we look
at their vision, which is to do
good in the world. Tactics for internal
stakeholders to take is to go and look at the company's
vision, purpose, and values. Ensure that every stakeholder is familiar with this and
understand these elements. I'd also encourage companies to have a yearly
check-in session for internal stakeholders so
that they can refresh their memory on the vision,
purpose, and values. As a student, what
you can do now is to go and have a look
at your company's vision, values, and purpose, and see how that relates to the
company's brand voice.
4. Considering the Employees Purpose: In the first two lessons, we looked at how a
company positions itself. In this lesson, we will look at the importance of considering the internal stakeholders
thoughts and feelings and how that impacts the
company's brand voice. How does the
internal stakeholder feel and think about the brand? How does the internal
stakeholder represent the brand? As a key stakeholder group in representing the brand voice, it is important for the
internal stakeholder to know what their position and
role is within the company. They need to have a clear
understanding of the value they add to the company and
to the company's brand voice. In this lesson's example, we will be looking at Starbucks. Starbucks is considered
a human-centric brand. The reason they're perceived
as a human-centric brand is because of how they treat
the internal stakeholders. They call the internal members, not employees, but partners. They consider them in
making business decisions. They also feel that
internal stakeholders should be connected to
Starbucks' purpose. Starbucks really tries to create a strong internal culture with internal stakeholders
feel valued. They feel that they
have a role that's contributing to the brand
in a meaningful way. As they've groomed a
good internal culture, it comes through and how
the brand is represented. For leadership, the tactics
that you can take is to be open to your
internal team. Can they share
their thoughts and feelings with you and
are you listening? If they are not clear on what their purpose
at the company is, that there is a process from leadership side where internal
stakeholders can open up and speak to leadership about the purpose and how they're
contributing to the company. For internal stakeholders, I'd like to take
this a step further. Another tactic you can do is to reflect on your
personal motivation. Reflect on your whys. Reflect on your thoughts and feelings about the
company you work for. Reflect on beyond the day-to-day
activities of your role and think about how you are contributing meaningfully
to your company, why you're doing it, and how you're contributing
to the company's brand voice.
5. Aligning Internally & Externally: In this lesson, we will
explore the alignment between internal and external
branding and marketing. This is where it
all comes together. We've looked at how the
brand positions itself and we've also looked at the
internal stakeholder, the purpose, the role, how they feel and
think about the brand. The reason we've looked
at these two sides is to really see whether
these alignments between the external messages that are going out there and the internal processes
of the business. Evaluating the internal and
external marketing alignment will help to see with these gaps for growth
with the company and how the brand voice can be
embodied and embraced further. In this lesson's example, I will refer to Virgin Media, one of the world's largest
telecommunications companies. In an interview
with Virgin Media, they speak about
the importance of internal marketing as a
process and saying that internal marketing really helps all stakeholders to adopt
the brand's values. They explain that with
internal marketing, it should be easy to
understand and it should be an important process as part of the company to help
shape the brand. From a leadership point of view, go and evaluate with
this alignment between internal and external
marketing and branding. With the internal marketing is a supporting process for all stakeholders to help
to adopt the brand voice. As an internal stakeholder go and look at your company now. Go and look at the
brand guidelines, division, purpose, and values. Go and look at all
your notes about your own process in the brand, so your own thoughts and
feelings and actions, your purpose, and see if there's alignment
between the two. If there isn't, is this
something you can do about it? Do you have a support system
where you can go and inform leadership that there's
a possible misalignment? In the next lesson, we will go into a process
that will help facilitate the alignment between internal
and external marketing.
6. Building a Brand Voice: In this lesson, we will explore building brand voice
using the brain trusts. The brain trust
concept comes from Ed Catmull book called
Creativity, Inc. In the book he explains that Pixar success was heavily
influenced by the brain trusts. These were collaborative
workshopping sessions where leaders would meet together to discuss the problems pertaining
to a specific movie. Generally the people that were involved in the brain
trust for the movie, when people that were heavily involved in the
making of the movie, they were an outside
perspective that would offer feedback to the problems of the movie and
offer solutions. There would be a specific
day in the year at Pixar, where the brain trusts will
be taken to the next level. It would be opened up for all stakeholders of the company, where they would then come together in little groups across the company to discuss
how to make Pixar better. In this lesson, I will go into some details of
how to facilitate such a brain trust session to help build the brand voice of the company and to help internal stakeholders to adopt the brand voice of the company. It's important for these
individual sessions that will be happening potentially
across the company to have interdependent goal, so to have a singular goal that everyone is working towards. I would recommend that this is a brand voice session for the purposes of this
class specifically. I would also recommend
that it's not different departments that
each department is meeting, but that the departments
are split up, so people from all
walks of life, people from different
departments are then placed together in
these little sessions. It's a collaborative space. It's a space where people
can feel free to share their individual voices
to this session. The space should
also be candid and honest where people
can openly share, and not share in a
limited way about how they feel about
the business or brand. Remember to take note of
anything of importance that could really help move the company's brand
voice further. Your student action is to access the template for
this class project that is essentially a
little worksheet that will help you to go through
a brain trust session, it has some guiding questions. But the idea of a brain trust
is really that it's open, and you can go creative with it, so you don't have to follow
it to the T. These are just specific questions that
will help guide you when it comes to brand voice
within the brain trust. I'd recommend that for
now to do a mini version, do it within your team itself. Just to test it out,
see how it's going, and discuss brain
trust in that way. In the future, if
you'd like to then incorporate this
across the company, then you can do it with different people giving
different perspectives. I hope you greatly
enjoy the brain trust. It is an excellent way to start a nice
collaborative process, when we're speaking about a company's brand and how
to move the brand forward, and how internal
stakeholders can then become part of the process
of the brand voice.
7. Final Thoughts: Thank you for joining
this class on tips for internal stakeholders to adopt and embrace their
company's brand voice. Did you love it
as much as I did? Please consider
writing reviews as this will help me reach more
students on Skillshare. If you're interested in joining more classes by me on
branding and marketing, I'd love to have
you on the journey. I had this class specifically intended for internal
stakeholders and another one that's
called "writing the perfect brief for
creative stakeholders". It will be linked in the
about section of this class. Feel free to engage with
me or ask any questions related to those class in the discussion sections
of this class. You can connect with me
via my profile page on Skillshare which will also be linked in the about section. I encourage you to upload your class project to the project gallery
section for feedback. Now, going forth, host your next brain trust, and work on your team's affinity to the company's brand voice. All the best. Bye-bye.
Liz Creates, Brand Strategist & Designer@OstaraStudio
