Becolourful

Time for the seasonal campaign. So, what's your favourite Becolourful product? 🤔 Let us know. This year, ours has to be Candid Advice. If you need some, you know where to find us. … Becolourful gets complex B2B businesses excited and aligned around their brand manifesto so they’re (finally) on the same page and ready to make their mark. #brandstrategy #brandstrategist #brandingagency #brandvoice #verbalidentity

Does positioning mean niching? 🤔 At Becolourful we work with many professional services businesses – comms agencies, consultancies and design studios – and this question always comes up. More often than not, businesses want to be generalists because, quite selfishly, they like the variety of work, or they see it as the best route to growth: anyone can be a client. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute fans will agree. Yes, be all things to all people, the only thing that matters is mental and physical availability. But then we so regularly see business advisors saying vertical sector niching is the way to go. So what's a business owner to do? Here's my view. I invented BrandStrand® to identify all the different ways you can offer value to your customer. The point of a brand strategy is to choose exactly which kinds of value you want to stand by, to commit to, to become known for. And, no, meaningless 'mental availability' isn't going to work for you unless you're a global player with a mega ad spend. You need a proposition. I believe there are 18 different things a brand can be known for. That's 18 different positioning strategies. Just one of our 18 strands is based on vertical sector niching (it's part of my Expert Guidance strand). So there are still 17 other ways to play the market. Positioning can be oversimplified. We hear that you have two options, to be a niche player or a generalist. Or we hear that you need to choose a price position: value, mid or premium, and that's your positioning. Well, both 'value' and 'premium' are covered in BrandStrand®. But there are many other ways to make your mark in a sector too. With BrandStrand®, we ask business owners to find a trio of benefits they will commit to. And it's the nuanced overlap of the three that gives us an intriguing story. There are over 800 possible combos. That's a lot of strategic options. So while vertical niching is absolutely a valid strategy and works for many, there are many other options. Don't think of it as a binary choice. Instead think: "Which benefits do we want to be famous for?" 👍 Give me a like if this graphic helps you (finally) make more sense of positioning. ----- Want to know more? Join us for an in-depth online training session exploring BrandStrand® on 14th January. £295 plus vat if booked by 13th December, then £395. Limited to 20 places: https://lnkd.in/e8tiC89s ----- Becolourful gets complex B2B businesses excited and aligned around their brand manifesto so they’re (finally) on the same page and ready to make their mark. #brandstrategy #businessstrategy #brandstrategist #brandpositioning

Black what now? Don't be noisy, be interesting. Be the brand that commands a premium not the brand that competes on price. … Becolourful gets complex B2B businesses excited and aligned around their brand manifesto so they’re (finally) on the same page and ready to make their mark. #brandstrategy #brandvoice #verbalidentity #brandingagency #toneofvoice

Emily's piece in Design Week today: "As a profession, we need to simplify branding to win over these business owners, and that starts with the dark art of brand strategy, a discipline that succeeds in mystifying even the most experienced business leaders, marketers, and creatives too. I often find myself explaining that all we’re trying to do is unearth the benefits a brand wants to be known for, so we have a focus. But far too often, brand strategy fails because it’s either too vague, too generic, or too detailed. All unhelpfully structured around terms no-one agrees on, like vision, mission, purpose, positioning, essence and pillars." https://lnkd.in/eZKhXENY

Brand voice isn't copywriting. Yes, you heard me. You see, when you think about it, it's actually culture change. Recently we’ve won three new projects, each at above the given budgets, because we weren’t selling ‘copywriting.’ There’s a simple way to know if a copywriter is about one-off creativity or strategic brand thinking first. Those that talk about ‘tone of voice’ tend to be thinking short term – it’s a phrase that’s come out of the ad industry and makes sense for a specific creative project. (The other indicator is that they're all about taking credit and winning awards when it really should belong to the client.) Think in terms of ‘brand voice’ and the clue is there in the label. This is about supporting the brand through its language, across all channels and occasions. Tone can change, voice is a constant. Brand voice is not about injecting a big Oatly personality into a new campaign and I never ask clients to plot where they sit on an axis of ‘formal’ to ‘informal.’ We need to get past this binary thinking of serious vs fun. Establishing a brand voice is absolutely about defining the character of the brand and we do that by creating a rounded brand character – our narrator if you like – not by relying simply on three adjectives to do the work. And more than that it’s about finding the rules that will make that happen. I'm tired of the huge gulfs in brand personality between the big-agency-derived advertising and internally written day-to-day communications. Audiences aren't stupid. It smacks of inauthenticity. It turns out that if you want to change the culture of writing in a workplace, you can’t just throw big statements or key words at your staff on an away day. People are very very tired of empty adjectives and meaningless mantras. What makes the impact for the long term is to embed simple micro rules that are easy to follow. We call them ‘Quick wins to work in style’ and you’ll find them at the start of every brand voice guide. It's the TLDR. Because let’s face it, people don’t read guidelines, or at least don't internalise them. Which brings me on to my final point: training not guidelines. People need to ‘get it’ and guidelines aren’t enough. We need to build internal champions of the brand voice. As ever in business, it turns out it's about people. We all know culture change is never effective when it's simply about big gestures, that's posturing. It’s got to be about the practicalities. Operationalising the actions on the ground that will move the needle. Brand voice work is culture change and that's why we treat it like a culture change project. 👉 Follow Becolourful for more on brand strategy and verbal identity. … Becolourful gets complex B2B businesses excited and aligned around their brand manifesto so they’re (finally) on the same page and ready to make their mark. #brandstrategy #brandstrategist #toneofvoice #verbalidentity #brandvoice

But how do you get to the *eureka* moment? The process of brand strategy is well documented. The steps, the questions, the structural frameworks. If you’re digging into all three Cs (customers, competitors, company) as you should be, you end up with a lot of data. But data itself doesn't provide direction. If your strategy deck has more than 10 slides, it’s a research debrief. A brand strategy needs to make sense on one page. Few people talk about how to distil all that knowledge into a succinct and meaningful set of words that will inspire change and action. The actual strategy bit. This is where the decisions are made and the direction is set. What if you didn’t need to get into that head-spin searching for the elusive answer? Our approach is new and different. Over the years we’ve designed many workshop activities to help groups look at things in new ways. One exercise started to shine brighter than the others. It was always the moment when eyes lit up and excitement buzzed in the room. There was meaningful debate instead of puzzled faces and overwhelm. So we developed it into a comprehensive tool. Feedback from real clients: “That was brilliant. The penny just dropped.” “This is so interesting.” “Now I get what brand strategy is.” Feedback from strategists: “Wow.” “Now you've got my attention.” “Is this trademarked?” BrandStrand® is a framework of 18 strands of customer value. You find a powerful trio of brand benefits that become your north star. The DNA strands of your business. No more vague vision and mission statements or nonsensical wordplay. It cuts out the waffle and gets you to the fundamentals that actually matter. That can drive action. Talk to us about finding your way out of confusion. 👉 See the BrandStrand® manifesto on the website 👉 Next masterclass with Emily Penny will be in January. Message Masterclass to book your spot. … Becolourful gets complex B2B businesses excited and aligned around their brand manifesto so they’re (finally) on the same page and ready for growth.

It seems to me that most designers get into visual identity design because they care about the craft of design. Then they realise there’s this thing called ‘brand strategy’ which seems pretty important. We’re told that “a brand is not a logo” ad infinitum and designers look to brand strategy for answers. But listen up. A brand strategy is not a design brief. Or an ad brief for that matter. It’s nothing to do with “get someone to do something” – that’s comms. Useful, of course, but it stops well short and we need to get this in perspective. Brand strategy draws broad parameters. It’s almost closer to saying “this is the ballpark, and what we know it’s definitely not”. You’ll get some foundations – the audience, the opportunity, the proposition, the personality – but you still have an awful lot more to do to turn that into a brand identity system. Too often designers get given confusing 80-slide decks on brand strategy and I don't blame them for glazing over. You literally see the pain in their eyes. Because out of all of that only a few simple driving ideas will be relevant for them to make unmissable in visual assets. There are two reasons why brand strategy is not a design brief. 👉 1. Brand strategy informs way more than visual design Brand strategy defines the ideas at the heart of the business, to inspire everything from product to recruitment. Some of this can inspire design but please never think you need to create an identity that neatly packages up everything in the brand strategy in visual form, like a game of Catch Phrase. Colours and symbols with deep coded meaning can be a big distraction to the real task. 👉 2. Visual design goes way beyond positioning Design must connect with people conceptually and emotionally, sure. But it has a functional job to do: to aid stand out, navigation, and memorability. It is so important on a fundamental level and I wonder if this is often overlooked. While a ‘brand’ is "not just a logo", ‘branding’ very much is a logo along with a visual system that goes with it. It’s not enough to find a vibe, we need tangible hard-working elements that work across all probable touch-points. This is problem-solving and none of these challenges will be in the brand strategy. So how is a brand strategy helpful for a visual identity designer? ❤️ To empathise with the audience so you can design for them 🧠 To understand why this thing is valuable and different in the market so you can support the positioning 😃 To uncover starting points for visual personality But you’ll need a lot more to turn it into a visual identity brief. Let's take a moment to agree that the craft and problem-solving is awesome. Agree? I'd love to hear your take. ----- Becolourful gets complex B2B businesses excited and aligned around their brand manifesto so they’re (finally) on the same page and ready to make their mark. 👉 Ring my bell so you don't miss a post 🔔 #brandstrategy #brandidentity #brandingagency #brandstrategist

Unsung heroes? Did you know there are 5m+ SMEs in the UK that provide 60% of all jobs. These businesses are the mainstay of people’s lives. They’re not hidden away in a Californian business park, they are part of the fabric of our society. Yet, when we think of ‘brands’ and talk about examples of brand strategy, the same candidates come to mind: Coca Cola, McDonalds, Apple, Ikea, Lego. In the UK there are fewer than 8,000 businesses with more than 250 employees that are classed as 'large'. That’s tiny. Creatives and consultants love having household names in their portfolios but there are other magnificent businesses that need our help. These aren't all tiny local businesses with 2 or 3 people in the team or boot-strapping start-ups. The SMEs we work with are serious business. Our favourite client looks something like this: 🔥 £2m+ t/o 🔥 5-15 years in 🔥 30-150 staff 🔥 A senior leadership team 🔥 A small marketing function And they are growing. Whether that's about more new hires, new products or new markets. We love working with these businesses because their brand is critical for them. They need it to align the partners, inspire their teams, and put out a super clear proposition for customers. There really is a lot resting on this. So let's get it right. … Becolourful gets complex B2B businesses excited and aligned around their brand manifesto so they’re (finally) on the same page and ready to make their mark. #brandstrategy #businessgrowth #copywriting #brandvalues #toneofvoice

Our naming for Waythrough working with Brand Ethos is covered by Design Week today. See the full story here: https://lnkd.in/eNZEthDc #brandnaming #charitynaming #verbalidentity #brandvoice

What do you want to be famous for? We've spent years working out a spectrum of universal brand benefits. BrandStrand® makes positioning decisions much, much easier. There are only so many kinds of promises a brand can make. The important part is choosing yours. Nonsensical wordplay is no way to define a strategy. Get clear on what you stand for before you get creative about how to say it (oh and we can help with that part too). Talk to us about our BrandStrand® competitor audits to understand where you want to play. … Becolourful gets complex B2B businesses excited and aligned around their brand manifesto so they’re (finally) on the same page and ready to make their mark. #brandstrategy #brandstrategist #brandingagency #brandvalues #brandworkshop