- Corporate responsibility reporting: People, planet, and profit
- Online annual reports
- Building corporate brands
- Getting more from your annual report
- Maximizing value from an M&A deal
- Harnessing the magic medium: Sight, sound and story
- Building engagement: Connecting your people to your brand
- Telling your ESG story: Trends in corporate responsibility reporting
- Research Summary: Employee engagement trends
- The corporate museum—your living story
Elements of brand communications
Baker Brand Communications is committed to best practices in the area of brand development. Best practices include clear, easy-to-understand communications that avoid jargon. At the same time, some of the terms and concepts we work with benefit from a brief definition, either because they are not generally understood or because our definition differs from that used by other brand communicators.
The “brand platform” is the name we give to the set of insights and messages that serve as the foundation for shaping the brand experience.
As such, it serves as a blueprint for guiding the brand’s visual and verbal identity, and for the sum of its communications.
While specific elements may vary from platform to platform, the following are typical elements in a Baker Brand Communications platform.
Back story
What it is: A succinct, one- to two-page narrative that expresses the brand’s origins and reason for being, and that portrays the brand as a distinct player with a unique background and attributes in the marketplace.
Why it matters: The story provides a framework of understanding and an emotional tone that keeps all of the other deliverables in line. (Put another way, everything else we develop is basically a tool for telling this story.)
Often, we will also develop alternate, usually shorter, versions of the master back story for specific uses such as press releases and product packaging.
Target audience insights
What it is: A bullet-point summary of key points relating to the various audiences the brand addresses. We think of each audience as a distinctive opportunity for connecting with the brand. This summary, which is usually based on some form of research, considers the primary audience or audiences, typically customers, as well as secondary audiences. Secondary audiences may include additional types of customers, distributors, the financial community and the media, as well as employees—a brand’s “internal audience.” At a minimum, the audience profile will define the segments and then detail their priorities with respect to the brand.
Why it matters: Provides a foundation of insight that helps to ensure communications directed to each audience are as specific and compelling as possible. “One size fits all” communications are ineffective, as are communications that fail to demonstrate a real knowledge of an audience’s needs and priorities.