Brand and communication success

Hi, I’m Matt.

I’m Chris, and we’re from Rusty Monkey.

We’re here!

Yes, in our new office.

Yes, soon-to-be new office. We haven’t broken into a warehouse. But we thought we’d start doing some vlogs. This is our first ever vlog and we’re gonna talk today really quickly about branding and communication.

Yep, and we’ve got four interesting videos that you really should watch if you own your own business or if you’re in a marketing department of a company.

Yeah, so we’ll just blast through them I think!

Yeah, go for it.

The first one is by Simon Sinek, it's his Golden Circle, which we use all the time. Whenever we talk to anybody about branding, we sit them down and we force them to watch this video straight away.

Yeah, the quality of the video isn't great, but the content of the video really shines through, and it's about why you do what you do in business, and how people communicate. Most companies communicate in one way, and Apple and all the other 'good' companies communicate in the other.

Yeah, so switching people's mindset to that philosophy can be challenging, but I think it's a really important thing. So if you're thinking about your branding and how you communicate, it's a must-watch. We watch it loads, because we sit with our clients and watch it, but also it's really good for us to just keep watching on occasion and refresh our ideas about how we help our clients communicate.

The second one is Seth Godin.

Yeah, he does a lot of videos about marketing, and he's interviewed about a million times on the internet. But there's one thing I found the other week that really struck a chord with us, and it's about what's the difference between a logo and branding. And he gives the example of Nike, doesn't he?

Yeah, Nike and is it the Hilton? One of the hotels- see I can't even remember the hotel chain because his argument is that it just really doesn't have a brand, whereas Nike does. And I think this is another good tool that we've used when talking to our clients, and something that you can do yourself as a thought experiment. Seth talks about if Nike were to start a hotel, we can all imagine or have an idea of what that hotel would look like, what it would be, and that's the power of Nike's brand. So, does your brand project into that environment? Could you imagine what your hotel would be like? Unless you're a hotel, then you probably wanna think of something else. So, projecting your brand into a totally different business, would you be able to communicate all of your brand beliefs in that way?

Yeah, it's a really useful video to watch, and we've used it when we've been doing a lot of rebranding work at the minute, and it's really helped us.

The third one is a much longer one, it's called the Naked Brand. We came across this when we were doing some research for another client, and we did a bit of a creative workshop to work through what they were trying to do and how they were going to communicate. And this is really interesting because it looks at advertising as a whole and how it's a dying medium. The big things I think we took away from that were a lot of work around cultural advertising - so, rather than spending $15m to have Nicole Kidman in front of a Chanel sign, rather than taking that approach to marketing, Pepsi did something that was much more cultural. They took the same marketing budget, they put it towards good causes that people could just basically get that advertising revenue for - kids sports days and things like that. And the return they got and the traction they got from the whole social media engine behind it was enormous, and loads more successful. And the second thing was around honesty.

Yep.

I bet every single one of you out there has got somewhere in your brand tone of voice (if you have that): 'honesty'. But how honest are you, actually? Because companies claim to be honest but actually do they really lay bare all of their warts and everything? It's about the power of that honesty and challenging people that might leave you a bad review, and talking to them and managing them visibly online, and all that kind of philosophy. It's a long watch but there's some really valuable things in there.

Yep, and honesty really comes through in a lot of brands that are up and coming, so Hiut Denim - who Meghan Markle bought some things off and it went massively viral - they started a jeans factory in a place which had closed down many years ago, and telling stories about that has really helped bring their brand forward. There's a lot of story-based marketing and honesty within all that, so it's a really good watch.

Yeah, it's great. The last one is... we watch these every Friday when we can, it's from a company called Moz. This is because we do web design and we do online marketing, we like to follow these guys, they're really great. And this particular video resonated with us. It's basically how to build a killer e-Commerce page. But the overriding message I think we get from a communications perspective is to answer questions before people have asked them, which is a great way to approach your copy and communication when you get down to that level of your brand - to make sure that you're answering stuff that people already have in their heads. 'How much is it gonna cost to get this wallet delivered to my address? Is there tax included? How much does it weigh? What does it look like?' All of these things are really important, so the more questions you preempt and answer in that respect, the better you're gonna communicate overall.

So they're our four. We hope that brings you some value. We always pass these on to anybody who's coming to us to help them communicate, help them with their branding, help them with their copy, their tone of voice, anything like that. And it's a great thing to check out if that's where you're at too.

And just to say that we'll be doing a lot more of these videos, so if you've got any questions about branding, e-Commerce, websites, anything else, just send them in, put them in the comments, and we'll try and do a vlog about it.

Yeah, let us know. Then we don't have to try and make them up ourselves.

Yeah, that'd be really useful.

Thanks very much anyway, I'm Matt, this is Chris.

Cheers.

We'll catch you later.