Quick and Easy Brand Assessment

What to do when Brand Attributes are missing from your User Experience Strategy Project

By David Pfeiffer, Digital and UX Strategist

Missing Brand Attributes

When starting up a new website or digital transformation discovery process, I always request the company brand guide. More often than not, it contains logo and style information, with little brand language or messaging platform information. Sometimes the company has some standard language for various marketing/sales campaign scenarios. This gap leaves out an important component of the overall User Experience Strategy development because the brand persona is not defined.

User Experience Strategy Development process (left to right)

The Brand Persona

Much like a customer persona, the brand persona is a model for the person talking to the customer at each of the customer experience touchpoints. As illustrated above, the brand persona, together with other models, guides the persona messaging platform and information architecture at each touchpoint.

The brand persona consists of attributes like those to the right.

Talking at the Customer

Many websites and touchpoints are still very company-centric. Brands tell customers who they are and what products they have with little regard for the user’s needs. This is the equivalent of “talking at” the customer. We see this when the “About” page appears as the first menu item, and when the callouts on the homepage are prizing the company or products with no concern for the customer’s problems.

The User-Centric Conversation

A user-centric approach models a conversation between the customer persona and the brand persona. This may be implemented as self-identification callouts linked to pages where the brand has a specific conversation about a solution that fits that user’s need. These conversation patterns are documented in the messaging platform which is a collection of helpful ideas in a language that the customer can consume and respond to.

Typical Brand Attributes

Brand Response to Competitive Factors

In a user-centric marketing and sales approach, the brand adds information on how they meet the needs of the customer who is comparing brands in the marketplace. It is important that the changes to the brand message don’t compromise the authenticity of the brand. This is accomplished by recognizing that the company’s core brand is strategic and the approach to the customer touchpoint is tactical.

The idea that a brand expresses itself strategically and tactically is at the heart of the Brand Fascination system. For this reason, it’s a great tool in the development of the overall user experience strategy.

The Brand Fascinate system

The Brand Fascinate system was devised by Sally Hogshead, a brand expert and NY Times best selling author. I highly recommend reading her book.

In my mind, here the main features of her approach:

Focus on Brand Advantage – Brand “Advantage” is the main focus of Brand Fascination. It embodies the advantage that your brand has over other brands and their value propositions.
Company Strategic Brand – The company has a “core brand advantage” developed over time in the marketplace that should be consistently nurtured. The brand primarily expresses its advantage through one of seven languages (described below).
Tactical Branding – The addition of messaging elements to a tactical situation enables the company brand to compete in various environments. The brand can add tactical attributes to its core to amplify characteristics that reposition the brand in a favorable way. For example, adding innovation characteristics to a trust brand to make it a trusted partner against an upstart innovator in the marketplace.

Brand Fascination

The Seven Languages of Brand Advantage

At the core of the Brand Fascination system is the language of the brand that makes it special. This is not to say visual marks are not important, but the language of the brand is essential to all forms of verbal and visual communication about the company’s advantage.

Brand Fascinate Languages – Copyright Sally Hogshead

Determining Your Brand Advantage

So how do you determine which one of the languages is core to your company? You could consider which language is best aligned with the aspirations of the company or take the Brand Fascinate test. The corporate brand advantage test consists of 28 questions that selects a strategic core brand advantage at the end of the test.

It might seem rather gimmicky for stakeholders to take a brand test, but most stakeholders in my practice found it interesting because it provokes a useful discussion on what the company wants to communicate to its customers.

Usually, I ask multiple “brand advocates” within the company to take the test and their inputs are averaged together. Interestingly, the company stakeholders usually agree with the test result and if they don’t, it is because they aspire to have one of the other brand advantage languages.

Corporate version of the Brand Fascinate test

Brand Advantage Summary

Summary of the Trust Brand Language model

The diagram illustrates a summary of the Trust Brand model attributes, one of the seven fascination languages. You will note it contains most of the brand attributes and writers guide information discussed above.

This summary fills-in much of what a brand may be missing, allowing the creation of a robust brand persona. As stated above, the brand persona is an essential model for the UX designer, content strategist, and content developer as they write about and for the brand.

In many ways, a trust brand is foundational for established companies. The Fascinate Trust Brand Advantage is a great strategic brand position, but it can lack marketing “sizzle.” This is where the Brand Fascination system can be used to keep the brand fresh and relevant.

Customize for Situational Touchpoints (Tactical Branding)

The power of the Brand Fascinate system is the ability to customize the brand language to fit various tactical scenarios. This allows the brand persona to speak to various competitive environments, customer persona types, and specific situations without sacrificing consistency.

The diagram below illustrates an example of how the Trust Brand Advantage language can be tactically customized to compete with other brands in competitive situations.

Here are some other scenarios where language is added to the brand to meet tactical goals:

Customizing the Trust Brand Advantage for custom situations

Competitive Environment Customizations

It is useful to survey the competitive environment to determine what companies have the largest digital footprint and what their brand language might be. The table below shows the Brand Fascinate positions (referred to a Brand Type in the green highlight) of a Farm-store company and their main competitors.

Surveying competitor Brands with the largest digital footprint in the environment

In this environment outlined to the left, there is a strong leader (highlighted in red), some languishing competitors (#2 and #4), a competitor on the rise (#1), and the company. This prompted a conversation on how the company wanted to converse with the customer about their needs. The company may choose to customize it’s website touchpoint message to emphasize the innovative side of the brand. This can be accomplished via a larger budget for marketing campaigns adding innovation to their core brand advantage.

Persona Customizations

Customizing personas is another form of tactical customization. An example of this might be when the brand is speaking to C-suite executives, who are likely to respond to the language of confidence (Power brand). Here are the adders to a Trust brand message to customize it for a Power brand consumer:

Adding Power messages to a Trust Brand

Campaign Customizations

As discussed above, a Trust + Innovation marketing campaign directed at a channel that values innovation could reposition other competitors to appear unstable. This can be accomplished by adding innovative messaging attributes to the core brand, emphasizing the company’s pedigree.

The power of this overall approach is that it provides the core brand with consistency while supporting situational messaging opportunities.

Adding Innovation to the Trust Brand

Conclusion

The Brand Fascinate test and language system is a quick and easy way to fill in the brand attribute gaps for your brand persona. It can also be used to promote messaging consistency in a company that does not have an intentional brand program. It also supports the tactical customization of the brand persona for websites, persona-oriented pages, and other digital touchpoints.

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Email me at: david@jondpfeiffer.com

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