Marketing: Tips for Adopting & Embracing Your Company’s Brand Voice | Liz Creates | Skillshare
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Marketing: Tips for Adopting & Embracing Your Company’s Brand Voice

teacher avatar Liz Creates, Brand Strategist & Designer@OstaraStudio

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:47

    • 2.

      Accessing Brand Identity Guidelines

      1:43

    • 3.

      Knowing the Vision, Purpose & Values

      2:28

    • 4.

      Considering the Employees Purpose

      2:34

    • 5.

      Aligning Internally & Externally

      2:19

    • 6.

      Building a Brand Voice

      3:34

    • 7.

      Final Thoughts

      1:04

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About This Class

Passionately convey your company’s brand messaging with brand strategist and designer Liz Pienaar! 

Advertising, sales and marketing were once perceived as separate functions to a business, but now they are becoming more intertwined. This holistic approach to brand messaging is vital to understanding how to successfully connect and relate to audiences. Join Liz as she shares tips for empowering internal stakeholders to embody a company’s brand voice in a way that is authentic yet aligned with the entire team.

Together with Liz, you will: 

  • Gain a greater understanding of your company’s brand guidelines and values
  • Learn your own value and role within your company’s brand messaging
  • Explore the alignment between internal and external marketing
  • Adopt a method for realigning with your company’s brand voice 

Whether you’re an internal stakeholder who would like to learn how to adopt your company’s brand voice or you’re a leader who would like to facilitate the process of your teams adopting your company’s brand voice in a more empowering way, this class is for you!

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This class is intended for students of all levels.

Meet Your Teacher

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Liz Creates

Brand Strategist & Designer@OstaraStudio

Teacher

Hello students,

I'm Liz and I am passionate about brand storytelling.

My main goal on SkillShare is to help students become empowered in the topics of branding and marketing. To make sure you walk away from my classes feeling empowered and ready to implement what you have learnt, I work hard to make my classes easy to understand, practical, and actionable. I would like you to feel supported throughout your SkillShare class experience, so always feel free to connect with me in the Discussions of the class.

 

Get to know me:

I am a qualified brand strategist and designer, and after losing interest working for a single corporate for many years, I started my own creative design and strategy consultancy called Ostara Studio. At Ostara we help build, v... See full profile

Level: All Levels

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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.