Let’s face it, there is no shortage of articles written about the power of branding.
Wrought with jargon, even I, as the creative director of a branding agency, sometimes have to look up terms to remind myself what the words mean. And when I do look them up, three similar agencies have three very different definitions of the same thing. So how can we expect our clients, especially prospective clients, to understand how we’re different when we’re virtually swimming in the same sea of sameness we work so diligently to get them out of?
What I believe it boils down to is integrity. The idea that we do what we say we’re going to do. That when we say we build brands with purpose, we’re talking about our own intentions as much as our clients’ values. That when we say there’s no B team, we don’t just mean it, we pride ourselves on it. It’s about how we interact with our clients and work with them, not for them.
For us, it’s about boiling things down and explaining them in a way our mothers can understand. Because believe me, they ask. And it’s no fun at the dinner table fumbling around with concepts like “promise” and “positioning” if we don’t actually have a position on what they mean. The true heart of what we deliver needs to be memorable. Short. Succinct. SIMPLE.
Take Santa Barbara Botanic Garden for example. Their mission was clear, and had been for almost a hundred years. Conserve native plants and habitats for the health and well being of people and the planet. But something was getting lost in translation, especially for the various departments and stakeholders who needed to communicate their mission to a broad base of audiences. They were operating in silos and lacking a consistent way to talk about their work.
Through deep research and discovery with their teams, from scientists obsessed with lichen to volunteers who just wanted to talk native plants, we were able to help deconstruct their various challenges and reformat them into a unified framework.
Positioning them as a global model for environmental conservation created a sense of pride and long term vision. Simplifying their promise to “inspire a native plant movement” unified their passions. And by blurring the lines between departmental work through three core actions…(foster love and appreciation, transform knowledge into solutions, and lead with hope and optimism) we helped create a cadence and narrative framework that the entire organization believed in, could follow, and utilize no matter which audience they spoke to.
The process didn’t change who they were or what they did, it simply revitalized and refocused their communication strategies to engage more audiences in conservation. It also laid the critical groundwork for us to build off of as we brought this internal structure forward into their brand voice and visual identity.
Our job is to cut through the clutter and find what is authentic to our clients the same way we find what is authentic to us. There may not be some silver bullet waiting in the wings, but in the end, there is truth. About who we are and who our clients are and how together, we can create a brand that embodies the vibrancy and resilience of whomever we work with.
