Strategy & Brand

Organizations that churn out a tired press release every time a deal is sealed, or donation made, are relying on an outdated way of working that just won’t cut it in the new world order. It’s time to do away with the generic, self-serving, homogenized, bland, corporate press releases that have plagued us all for far too long.

More than 70% of shoppers strongly believe that brands waste too much money on marketing and advertising.  Talk is cheap; experience isn’t; and the discerning citizens we’re all hoping to impress with our PR efforts know it. Organizations that have a relevant message and authentic purpose will have to cut though the meaningless chatter to make it in print, on the news, and over the airwaves.

So, what’s in a good press release? A good press release…

-Tells a relevant newsworthy story that has meaning and purpose outside the self-serving motivations of the author organization.

-Has all the important, interesting, noteworthy, and appealing details a journalist would need to write a thrilling article on your newsworthy subject. If your press release isn’t interesting the article about you likely won’t be either (if one even gets written). Remember, You’re Too Good for Boring.

-Is only sent to people who will actually want to see it, otherwise it’s just plain old spam. If you’re not sure who within a news organization to send the press release to, just make a phone call and ask the receptionist (pre-emptive calls are preferred to misdirected mail).

-Is written for two audiences- the journalists who will write about it, and the journalists’ readers. You have to make it relevant to both parties- make it clear that this press release is interesting, the subject matter is relevant to the community,  and the subject matter will appeal to the newspaper’s readers (and help drive newspaper sales and site traffic).

-Has the who, what, where, why, & when parts in the first paragraph or two of the press release. Journalists write articles with most important/pivotal/technical details first and least important details last- so it helps them want to write about your press release if it’s written like they themselves would write an article.

-Answers the questions people would ask if you were talking about this in person, or the negative thoughts/opinions/perspectives you’ll want to overcome. Use your vivid creative narrativity-soaked lingo to help overcome the obstacles and objections and answer the important questions.

-Is short and sweet- stick to one page in length. Be concise, but not boring.

“Omit needless words, omit needless words.” E.B. White

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” Friedrich Nietzsche

-Conveys the brand- from content to tone, style, and method of delivery.

-Has an interest-catching and to-the-point title. The title and the first line should hook your reader.

-Is sent as a link in an email, or as a printed and snail-mailed document, not as an attachment and never as a fax. The fax machine has become irrelevant, so sending a press release via fax makes your press release seem irrelevant too (don’t be the reason newspapers and magazine still have to own fax machines- get with the times and send a pdf).

-If it’s sent via email, the subject line should make the recipient actually want to open it. Writing “Press Release” in the subject line is lazy, and boring. Just say no to boring!

-Is sent out timely. Not just ‘in advance’, but also when the timing is relevant. If you’re hosting a cycling fundraiser, wait to send the press release until you’re well into the planning stage and have details to announce- a date, a website, donor and racer info, etc. That you’ll be hosting an event, at some point in the future to raise money for a cause TBA, isn’t news. You shouldn’t write a press release until you have newsworthy reportable info worth reading about, writing about, talking about… Timing is everything.

Sometimes, the key to a great press release is breaking the rules- with purpose and intention. For example, BlackDog’s digital press releases always have a second page (in print it’s a front and back, but in its digital incarnation- it’s two separate rule-breaking pages). If you have a good reason for overturning the accepted norms, go for it- so long as it’ll convey the brand, meet the needs of journalists and editors, and get your newsworthy tale in front of your target audience.

As a general rule, BlackDog doesn’t brand upstarts. Here are some resources to help get your brand new brand off the ground though…

If you can’t find the answer to the brand query you’re muddling over, puzzling out, and Googling till the cows come home, send it our way. BlackDog’s 365 blog is an ongoing, evolving, question and answer guide developed to help business owners and entrepreneurs understand and hone their brands. Submit your questions on brand, branding, or branders to BlackDog and we’ll send you a personal response with the answer. An anonymous and confidential version of your question and our response will then be posted on BlackDog’s 365 blog to help out your fellow ponderers.

What’s a Brand?

• The Big Idea
• Logo vs Brand
• Who Defines a Brand?
• Brand Success – Just a Marketing Plan?
• Brand vs Advertising

Do You Need a Brand?

• Why Do I Need a Brand?

Naming Your Brand:

• How to Name a Startup
• 10 Ways to Name Your Company or Product
• Types of company and product names — A field guide

Slinging a Slogan:

• What’s The Difference: Good Tagline vs Bad Tagline

Picking a great URL:

• How to Find a Good URL without Having a Brain Hemorrhage

Finding Your Big Idea:

• The Big Idea

Differentiating Your brand:

• Differentiators…Let me count the ways
• Crazy. Inspired. Bold. Successful.
• How Do We Crate an Iconic Brand?
• Strip Away All the Filler…

Missions and Visions:

• Is Our Mission Our Brand Promise?

Components of a Brand Strategy:

• 19 Components of a Brand Strategy

Identifying Your Customer:

• Who Is Our Customer?

Identifying Your Brand Touch Points:

• What’s a brand touch point?

The Best Brand Book for Startups:

• Is There a Brand Book For Startups?

The Best Brand Books Period:

• Do You Have a Favorite Brand Book?

How to Write a Business Plan:

• Writing a Business Plan

Identifying Core Values:

• How Important are “Core Values”?
• Changing the World… One Brand at a Time

Developing Brand Standards:

• Hey, I Have Standards

Sponsorship  & Strategic Partnership Standards:

• Banners, logos, & Neon Lights, oh my!

Diversifying into New Markets:

• How Does A Brand Diversify Into New Markets?

The Truth About Brand Loyalty:

• Do You Believe in Brand Loyalty?

Synching Your Brand with Your Brand Experience:

• How do you sync brand and brand experience?

On Relevance, Transparency, & Avoiding Bullshit

• Do you ever get over whelmed by finding ways or trying to be inventive and original?
• The Better You Are, The Better You Look

Do Charitable Actions & Social Giving Build Brand Equity?

• Do Charitable Actions Build Brand Equity?
• Redux – Do Charitable Actions Build Brand Equity?

Bringing Your Humanity to Work:

• Brand Is An Inside Job

Communicating your Differentiated Brand:

• We Don’t Brand Bullshit: How BlackDog Does Communications
• Narrativity: You’re Too Good For Boring
• How Buff is Your Brand Narrative?
• Crafting Content out of Fingerprints
• Top Shelf: Communications Reads We Recommend
• Top Shelf Part II: More Communications Reads We Recommend

Brand & Social Media:

• Social Media – The Prize Inside
• The Rolling Stones Didn’t Have to Bribe THEIR Groupies
• Twitter, the Medium is the Message
• Social Media Masterminds: Facebook Pages that Are Getting it Right!

The hardest thing about Brand Development isn’t the time intensive research….

It isn’t being consistent yet flexible… innovative yet timeless.

The hardest thing about Brand Development isn’t creativity, charisma, social media, new marketing, old ideologies, fierce competition, or even too many cooks in the kitchen (although that is a much too oft encountered obstacle)… nope.

It isn’t over coming brain washing…. all those years of being told a brand is a logo, no… wait, a tag line… no…  an elevator pitch, an advertisement, a website, a banner, a name, a look, a campaign, a (___fill-in-the-blank___)… not those things either.

Nope… the hardest part is being explicit…

It’s precisely zeroing in on what really matters to your customers and  finding the guts to sing the glory of the story, explicitly, once you know it.

Successful brand development demands that an organization take the blinders off, put down the kool-aid, and walk tall and bold in the other guy’s shoes. Once you accurately identify the “pinch” your brand resolves…you’ve got to own it. Successful brands own their purpose, niche, cause, and message, explicitly.

Be precise about what you stand for and what you believe, where you’ve been and where you are going, what issues and values drive decisions, what you will and what you will not do. Be unequivocal about your purpose and absolute in your expectations.

A successful brand engagement should purpose to excavate an organization’s explicit brand:

• The kind of brand that transcends the conventional and continues to represent the foundation of the organization… it’s Big !dea.
• The kind of brand that connects employees, clients, customers and the public to the company’s mission, core competencies, differentiators, and powerful benefits through a carefully considered governing purpose, a meticulously crafted positioning statement, and a real “story” that means something to those you want to engage with your brand.
• The kind of brand that is unequivocally specific about what an organization does, how it’s done differently, why anyone should care, and what the company team and identity stand for.

You know…the kind of brand that literally double-dog dares customers, employees and partners not to choose it.

“Conscientious Objectives: Designing for an Ethical Message” by John Cranmer & Yolanda Zappaterra… An inspired look at the correlation between messaging, design, and social ergonomics. Cranmer and Zappaterra brilliantly tackle the design world’s accidental mantra: “if it looks good, it is good.” Written to fill a glaring gap, this book addresses the impact of design on ethical, sustainability-oriented, purpose-driven messaging.

“Guerrilla Advertising: Unconventional Brand Communication” by Gavin Lucas and Michael Dorrian… This book explores a varied array of noteworthy experimental campaigns that chose brand experience and guerrilla engagement over the same-old same-old way advertising had always been done. While a few of the examples depicted are likely to cause a well-deserved cringe, this read is guaranteed to get your creative cogs wheeling.

“Marketing Lessons From The Grateful Dead” By David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan… An easy reading case study on how the Grateful Dead broke the rules on purpose, for a purpose.

“This One Time At Brand Camp” by Tom Fishburne… The collected and cartooned satirical “What Not To Do” wit of Tom Fishburne, inspired by brand builders gone enthusiastically awry.

“The Elements of Content Strategy” by Erin Kissane… The charming, pink-haired, content-loving strategist we’ve come to know as @kissane has captured the nitty gritty how-to’s of content strategy and compiled them into a concise little manual that would make Strunk &White darn-right proud. A brilliant guide for accidental and aspiring content strategists alike.

“100 Best Annual Reports 2010” edited by B. Martin Pedersen… A collection of 100 annual reports that convey the brand, utilize design principles, and create distinction. If boring isn’t for you, this book might be.

For more reads we recommend, check out the Top Shelf  Part I.

Narrativity: [nar-uh-tiv-uh-tee]: 1.) the degree to which your brand spunk, funk, credibility, attitude, and vibe shines through your messaging. 2.) Your voice, your verbiage, your tone.

While preparing for a wine-touring camping trip to Watkins Glen, I began perusing the websites of the nearby Seneca Lake wineries and plotting my prioritized must-see, must-visit list for the alcohol-inspired excursion. I was frustrated to find that, with a mere handful of exceptions, every winery’s website looked and sounded the same, and they all lacked personality, pizzazz, and panache. Armed with an adventurous spirit, I finally gave up pre-planning my wine trail route, and decided to wing the whole experience. I visited several wineries I liked, several I very much didn’t, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d accidentally by chance driven right past my dream winery and missed my one chance at true varietal bliss.

If every brand looks and sounds the same, has same perspective, purpose, product, it doesn’t matter which winery you visit or which brand you choose. The one is as good as the other, and if you’ve had one you’ve had them all. If you’re distinct, worthy of note, and you hide behind  the same humdrum look, feel, sound, and practice as everyone else, no one will ever know you’re worthy of their time or attention. When everyone is just a different shade of beige, popped from the same drone mold, we’re all being robbed of an opportunity for preference and our worlds all have a little less color in them. Boring is thievery by complacency.

Narrativity is one of the ways bold brands with a story to tell differentiate their experience, brighten their color spectrum, and tell their too-good-for-boring tale. Your brand’s story is made up of your brand’s real-life, day to day, actions, decisions, products, events, partnerships, sponsors. It’s who you are, how you work, what you do, and why you do it.  Narrativity is the voice, tone, and verbiage you use to tell that vivid, appealing, authentic story. Narrativity is like a person’s distinct vocabulary and speech pattern. It’s the words and phrases you own, and it’s what makes you sound like you, instead of just like everybody else.

Here are a few examples of vibrant, saucy brands that have high degree of Narrativity:

Urban Daddy: A racy, random, irreverent city guide for liquor drinking, women loving, wannabe jet owning, good humored James Bond types the world over. After reading an article or three from Urban Daddy, you and your grandmother could both pick their work out of a line up blind-folded (if it was being read aloud).

Harley-Davidson: Harley doesn’t sell motorcycles, they sell freedom, self-expression, great escapes, and the open road. Harley’s “grab life by the bars”, “leave well enough behind”, “out to free the world” attitude is captured in and on everything from their advertisements to their annual reports.

Kraken Rum: This edge-of-the-world nautical brand is steeped in legend and only distilled for the fearless, seafaring, adventuring, unshaven at spirit. Once you’ve heard a Kraken ad, you can’t help but read the Kraken bottle and the Kraken story using their narrator’s speech pattern- it’s that alluring and distinctive. Kraken’s tone is so consistently conveyed with such a distinctive verve that their narrator’s voice and their content’s verbiage isn’t ever separate from the story, it’s part of their story.

For a sneak peek at Kraken’s vivid storytelling in action, check out their tale of the man-eating, ship-wreaking, sea-monster The Kraken, via their website.

Coffee Fool: Coffee Fool comes with a warning: their coffee is so fresh and delicious, everything else will taste bland and stale in comparison. What the warning doesn’t mention is that everything’ll look and sound bland in comparison as well. While other coffee roasters talk in coffee-speak about notes and tones and soils and geographies, these guys have a style all their own…. An example: the description for their only-brewed-on-Fridays flavor, Vanillamykahlua, proclaims it: “Tastes just like it sounds, with a little Hawaiian rumble in the jungle.” And the description for their knock-your-socks off bacon-flavored brew: “If everything tastes better with bacon, then why not coffee too? Our bacon flavor is not just roasted – it’s spit roasted. It’s so aromatic, you’ll be instant friends with your work colleagues and … any neighborhood dogs.”

“Made to Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath
Why do some ideas make powerfully indelible impressions and others just don’t seem to stick at all? Chip and Dan Heath have the answer to what makes some ideas “stickier” than most. The official how-to guide on crafting and conveying ideas that capture attention.

“The Designful Company” by Marty Neumeier
A designful writer, editor, marketer, or advertiser  crafts messages that are relevant, alluring, meaningful, transparent, accurate, and that actually matter. The Designful Company addresses the ways that divergent thinking can help writers align a brand’s messaging with its operations to maintain relevance and drive thought-leadership.

“Content Strategy for the Web” by Kristina Halvorson
The ultimate intro guide to creating, organizing, and managing web content that works. Halverson covers everything from auditing your existing content to figuring out your site architecture and long-term content management.

“Brand Digital” by Allen P. Adamson
Loaded with case studies, research, and the hard-earned wisdom of industry experts, BrandDigital offers an insightful perspective on developing brand presence, touch-points, recognition, and engagement through digital mediums. An outstanding follow-up to Adamson’s book “Brand Simple: How the Best Brands Keep it Simple and Succeed.”

“Art Direction + Editorial Design” by Yolanda Zappatera
An in-depth guide to conveying brand identity and connecting with target audiences through editorial design. Covers everything from layout design to color psychology, pull-quotes, and type- with excellent case studies and full illustrations.

“The Subversive Copy Editor” by Carol Fisher Saller
This University of Chicago Press manuscript editor shares her stories and advice to help writers and editors avoid squashing spirits, injuring egos, and create hostile relationships when editing someone else’s content- or trying to convey some else’s Big !dea. Saller’s tips and tricks are also helpful for navigating problem areas when you’re working collaboratively to engineer copy.

“Slide:ology” by Nancy Duarte
A practical guide to creating vibrant visual presentations- from the presentation experience to communicating your brand, color wheels, and font size.

“Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing” by Mignon Fogarty
The ultimate layman’s guide to grammar rules and their exceptions. It’s clear, concise, and has an excellent index.

“If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.” Tennessee Williams

The hardest part of crafting an authentic brand narrative is excavating who you really are, what you really do, and why you really matter.

It’s easy rattle off a check-list of standard, homogenized, industry phraseology that mimics what everyone else has always said about themselves. But you can’t differentiate yourself with corporate bologna and cookie cutter content. Saying what everyone else already says just makes you sound like everyone else.

If your narrative, the way you’re telling your story, doesn’t flawlessly capture your real-life story, identity, and Big !dea – you haven’t gotten it right yet.

Excavating what really matters is rarely an easy task, and the process is exponentially more daunting, grueling, and gut-wrenching when you’re close to the story. In “Made to Stick,” Chip and Dan Heath help brand stewards understand what journalists have long called “burying the lead.” While explaining the “burying the lead” concept, the Heath brothers quote the hard earned wisdom of newspaper editor and communications professor Ed Cray: “The longer you work on a story, the more you can find yourself losing direction. No detail is too small. You just don’t know what your story is anymore.” [1] Instead of giving in, giving up, and settling for generic content, focus on what really matters: Your Big !dea, your points of differentiation, your unique perspective.

When you’ve gotten it right, your one-of-a-kind narrative will be inseparable from the real life organization. When it’s right, you’ll know it! It’ll feel authentic, ring true, and resonate with your customers, your employees, and your favorite barista at the corner coffee shop.

[1] Ed Cray, Professor of Communications at the University of Southern California. QTD In: Chip Health and Dan Heath. “Making it Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.” New York: Random House, 2008. P. 32.

Everything that you say says something about you.

Your brand narrative is how you tell your story. It runs deeper than a marketing rollout or an advertising campaign.  Your brand narrative is told in and through newsletters, press releases, promotions, CRM, sales, programming, products, annual reports, and internal communications- day in and day out. Your ongoing narrative should reflect your brand vision and purpose, your strategic direction, your operational tactics, your intent and partnerships. If crafting your brand narrative isn’t a constant, grueling, and tedious ongoing process, then it’s likely you’re producing ineffective noise.

Wrestling your brand narrative into focus requires skill and authenticity. Calling yourself cool doesn’t make you cool and calling your brand relevant doesn’t make it relevant. Drop the ego, the corporate-bologna, and the stuffy verbiage from your self-promotions and figure out how to reflect who you really are and what you really have to offer. Narrativity is not vague or generic.

Meticulously crafted brand narratives connect with people; they gracefully distinguish your unique interests, voice, differentiators, and the powerful benefits that genuinely matter to clients and customers. Brands that make a connection, reinforce their relevance, and speak to people are identified immediately as the must-have solution; the real deal, second to none. Your brand narrative should convey the personality, style, and strengths that enliven your collective organization.

Your communications are a reflection of your brand identity and directly contribute to your brand image, whether you intended them to be or not.

Here are a few questions to help you do a quick audit of your Brand Narrative:

• Do your messages accurately communicate your story?
• Are your messages genuine and authentic or just feel-good self-compliments and well-worded spin?
• Does your brand’s spunk, funk, credibility, attitude, personality, sensitivity, or vibe shine through your messages?
• How do your messages reflect your brand identity, values, and strategy?
• Are your messages clear and concise?
• Do your messages speak to the real issues that concern your audience?
• Do your messages reflect the values of your audience?
• Are you addressing the relevant issues on the minds and the immediate ‘To-Do’ lists of your customers?