Corey partner, Andrea Naddaff, recently wrote an article on branding in “Independent Agent” magazine, a publication whose readers include a national alliance of 300,000 business owners and their employees who offer insurance and financial services products.

Did you know that your brand speaks volumes before you do? Have you stopped to think about what your brand is telling prospects and clients before you even say a word? Does your brand convey the attributes that you sell—trust, caring and responsibility? In today’s world, where people are constantly bombarded with noise, it’s worth stepping back to think about how (and if)… every element of your brand is consistent and clear.

It’s difficult to understand a brand if its message is muddled. And in any industry, clear messaging is vital to stand out among the competition. Does your brand convey what you tell your customers?

If your brand’s action doesn’t parallel its message’s words, it can become indistinct and confusing. When producers selling your organization’s services and products are confused, the customer will also, ultimately, be perplexed. The process starts with an overarching idea—a cohesive message—that cascades to a series of sub-messages targeted to your target audiences.

A strong and cohesive messaging system must be coupled with the right sales toolkit; the combination unifies the message verbally and visually, presenting the brand the way it should be understood by various audiences. Through this method, the much sought-after brand equity, which we define as the sum of time, consistent communication and consistent delivery, is created and attained. While a convoluted message may not necessarily tarnish a blue chip player entirely, it will certainly result in an undisciplined and potentially disregarded brand defi nition. To the same lengths, a poorly-defined message can hinder a new launch. Here are some tips and trigger points that can help to ensure a better understanding of how a brand speaks to its customers and what it is telling them:

1. Words matter. Make sure all sales and business development staff have reached a level of unison and speak from the same script. Good messaging architecture gives license to use one’s own jargon or speak, but the overall protocol of the messaging system must always be respected.

2. Tools matter. No matter how talented or experienced they might be, all sales and business development professionals need the proper tools to sell and succeed. Whether those tools include PowerPoint presentations, an intranet system that houses the tools or a Word template, they must be developed to function in a way that works for you.

3. Consistency matters. Ensure that all multiplatform and marketing communication channels of the message look and behave like they are from the same brand family. Then, take advantage of social media to express other aspects of the brand’s story that also need and deserve to be told.

Be sure you take a look at how your brand performs and what it conveys when you aren’t able to verbally explain it. The story should be the same, and in any business, that means establishing trust and conveying the feeling that the customer or prospect matters from the very first time they read, see or hear about you. I trust and conveying the feeling that the customer or prospect matters from the very first time they read, see or hear about you.

We always love doing work for nonprofits and we recently finished developing a nonprofit brand from the ground up. What was formerly CollegeSUCCESS will be Beyond12 in a few weeks once their new Web site and brand goes live. We sat down with founder and CEO Alex Bernadotte to ask her some questions about her company’s brand, her background, and Beyond12. Beyond12 is true social entrepreneurship–it is a national nonprofit organization looking to increase the number of first generation, underrepresented and low-income students who graduate from colleges and universities. If you have any other questions for Alex, please comment here.

 Why did you decide to hire Corey as your branding firm?

I had worked with Chris Klaehn and Corey previously on several projects and was very impressed and satisfied with their work. Since Beyond 12 is my “baby” so to speak, I wanted to work with a firm that I already had trust and confidence in, so naturally I turned to Corey first.

What was the most important message you were looking to convey with the redesign of your Web site?

Beyond 12 is a new organization so Corey developed our brand from scratch – our name, our logo, our tagline, our brochure and other collateral, and our website. As a nonprofit startup, it was really important for us to drive home the point that we are a mission-driven “experienced” and “exciting” brand. Because we work with several stakeholders (high school and college administrators, college students, policymakers, etc.) we needed a brand and website that appeals to a very diverse audience. This is never an easy task, but Corey was able to help us prioritize and synthesize our message.

What did you like most about Corey’s thoughtful process?

I love the fact that Corey listened to us. What a novelty?! The team spent a lot of time with us initially to get a sense of who we are and to understand our mission and vision. They asked a lot of difficult questions, provided expert guidance but, in the end, they let us drive the process. As result, we ended up with a brand and materials that are truly reflective of who we are and what our organization aspires to be.

 Why did you decide to start Beyond12?

Many social entrepreneurs talk about having a “moment of obligation” that leads them to start their organizations. My “moment of obligation” began when I was a freshman at Dartmouth. Because I was the first person in my family to attend college, my transition from high school to college was difficult. My focus for 17 years in high school had been on getting in to college, but then I was not prepared for the journey after admission. But through a combination of hard work and peer support, I succeeded in also becoming the first in my family to graduate from college. My difficulties at Dartmouth planted the seed for my personal and professional commitment to ensure that all students have access to a college education and are given the tools to successfully navigate their college careers. Four years ago, during a meeting with a mentee, my moment of obligation crystallized. This young lady had just begun her sophomore year and was struggling to understand how and why she would succeed when so many of her friends had already dropped out. I was confident that I could help her realize her dream to graduate from college, but what about all her friends and other students like her who needed my help? I decided then that the field needed an organization to address these college retention challenges on a systemic level and so began Beyond12.

How did you get into the education industry?

I started working in education immediately after college and I’ve worked in this field in various capacities and for a variety of organizations, both for-profit and nonprofit, ever since.  

What was the most challenging part of starting a company?

The most challenging part of starting a company is managing the hundreds of competing priorities. On any given day, my “to do” list consists of about 100+ items that are all critical and there are, unfortunately, only 24 hours in a day. So, learning not to sweat the small stuff has been a real challenge, as has operating on 3 hours of sleep a night! However…no matter how challenging of a day I am having, I never forget that it is a privilege to wake up every day and actually call what I am doing “work.”

 What advice does Beyond12 give to students?

We work with our students to help them have the most successful college experience possible and to ensure that they are effective both in and out of the classroom. Ultimately, our goal is to make sure that our students graduate from college with a degree that provides them with meaningful economic and personal prospects - one that allows them to provide for their families, contribute to society, and break the cycle of poverty for the next generation. Some words that you’ll probably hear us say a lot to our students:

·       “College is not a destination but a steppingstone” – we remind them that the goal is to earn a degree that they can translate into a rewarding future. We encourage them to build a road map for their college journey and beyond

·       “College should not be a solitary experience” – we encourage our students to use all of the resources on their campuses, to visit their professors and advisors during office hours and, most importantly, to ask for help.

What is the most rewarding part of your job?

The most rewarding part of my job is getting up every day and doing something that I absolutely LOVE and am so passionate about. Not many people have the opportunity to combine their personal and professional passions so I consider myself very lucky.  

Andrea Naddaff, Partner at Corey, responds to Susan G. Komen Fights for Trademark on American Public Media’s Marketplace Web site.

“I am reminded of Rodney King’s famous sound bite ‘People, please, can’t we just get along?’. If we put this issue in branding parlance, Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure is the uber-brand of the pink ribbon and ‘race for the cure’. The other organizations can be considered as partners and should leverage the power of the creator to help establish their cause by crediting their inspiration. So, what am I saying? Susan G. Komen should be more charitable and the other organizations should be more respectful. ”

Read the full article.

A key question when developing social media strategy or a website is “Who do we target?”. “Who will be the most effective individuals to reach with our message?” Often these target audiences break down into two groups. Advocates for your organization, people who are invested in you and your offering, and the public, customers or end users - the ultimate recipients of your offering. A typical website design or social media strategy will try to reach these two groups in varying proportions.

But there is a third group, a group as important as either and one that can have a disproportionate effect on reaching end users. We call this group “Messengers.” Unlike your advocates, messengers are an audience that you don’t have direct contact with on a regular basis. They don’t follow your every word but they do share an affinity for your ideas, your topics and your issues. They might already be talking about your issues without mentioning your organization. Sometimes messengers talk about your topic on a regular basis, sometimes more sporadically as events or seasonality dictates.

HOW TO IDENTIFY AND MODEL MESSENGERS
Market segmentation is one of the primary ways to identify end user audiences for products and messages, but identifying messengers requires different tactics. Segmentation gives us average demographics across wide swaths of population. With messengers we want to identify the small percentage of individuals talking about our topic, especially those that are having a disproportionate influence on the conversation.

We identify these individuals by looking at trends in online conversation. Social media analytics makes it possible to track these trends through blogs, Twitter and Facebook. We look for people talking about our topics (via keyword analysis) and then track down their influence by looking for how often they are followed, cited and linked to over time.

For example, working with a non-profit trying to increase usable green space in urban areas, we might look for bloggers and tweeters that are not only talking about gardening and CSAs, but also have a large following and are linked to and retweeted by their audiences.

Tools like Radian 6 and Morningside Analytics can help us achieve this through keyword analysis and social media monitoring.

WHAT DO MESSENGERS WANT?
Once we identify our messengers, how do we know what they want? User personas are one of the best tools we can use to understand the mindset and goals of this important audience. User personas are profiles of archetypal users based on qualitative research: interviews and focus groups. The personas themselves not only capture the demographics and mindset of an individual messenger, but also explicitly lay out goals that this person wants to achieve in relation to our content and message.

User personas give us a basis on which to design a social media strategy and a website presence that will serve messenger goals while moving our content into their channels.

Most often we find messengers are looking for three things:

• RELEVANCY - Messengers want content and information that matches their own needs and interest.
• EXCLUSIVITY - Messengers want to be the first and only one on their block with fresh content.
• RECOGNITION - Messengers want to know that they are being heard. Giving them a shoutout on your social media channels or on your website can boost your message beyond a simple broadcast.

Sometimes user research can yield surprising results. In a recent project we found that a client’s archive of older content had even more relevance to it’s key messengers than the new content that it was producing weekly. Indexing this archive of older content and developing an easy-to-use search UX then became one of the priorities of our work.

Tools like user personas, market segmentation and social media analytics are essential tools that we use at Corey to ensure that we are achieving the most for our clients. Understanding your audiences, be they advocate, messenger or the public, holds the key to ensuring the success of your online messaging efforts across a wide range of groups.

A funny thing happened at the office this morning. I was in the midst of composing a blog about the brilliance of the Web-based Old Spice “Thank You” ads, when Forbes.com broke my heart: “Old Spice Man Ends Victorious Campaign To Conquer Twitter, YouTube”.

It was a tragic scene. I almost began sobbing when I took to my Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry with the words, “Plug pulled on Old Spice Man as I’m writing blog about him.” (“Write fast, with an epilogue,” one response said.) I watched my seemingly witty sentences rot like parsley in a microwave: “I’m on efforts to receive a mention like Old Spice on desperate men everywhere” would be unseen by the world and, most devastating, by Old Spice spokesman Isaiah Mustafa.

Wieden + Kennedy, the Portland, OR-based advertising agency behind the Emmy-nominated campaign, has been heralded for its execution of the advertisements; social media guide Mashable called the agency “the future of marketing” for having “set the standards all marketing experts will worship and follow in the years to come.” But what I want to know is, who’s emerged from the campaign as his own brand: Isaiah Mustafa, or just the Old Spice Man?

Prior to landing the Old Spice gig, Mustafa was just another nameless-yet washboard-abdominal-laden actor. He played in the NFL for three years, unbeknownst to anyone who didn’t religiously follow football, and his résumé was scattered with one-time appearances on canceled television series, soap operas and made-for-TV movies. Today, he’s being interviewed by the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres and ABC News correspondent John Berman.

But it’s really Mustafa’s alter ego who’s receiving the most attention, largely from women. When I surveyed a handful of my male and female peers about it, no one recognized the actor’s name (but immediately knew who I was referring to when I said, “You know, the Old Spice Man”), nor did any of them believe that more men would buy Old Spice products as a result of the campaign. In fact, BrandWeek announced this week that sales have dropped 7%.

“I just don’t see a man rushing out to buy something because another man in a towel told him to,” said one male friend. “But I’m sure the desired result was for [women] to persuade their men to get some Old Spice.”

Which leaves the future of Mustafa’s acting career in question. While he may have initially escaped the curse of typecasting after being booked for a role in an upcoming Tyler Perry drama, many think that audiences won’t take him seriously outside of his iconic spokesman engagement. Old Spice Man as a serious actor? It’s almost like asking Costco to carry Aston Martin.

Of course, the opposite could be true: Mustafa might be so talented or well-received that his past as The Man Your Man Could Smell Like is forgotten, only to be recalled when he receives his first Oscar and someone asks, “Wasn’t that guy in deodorant commercials?” After all, Brad Pitt got his start in a Pringles ad.

For now, the masses are mourning the loss of the Old Spice Man, some even willing his valiant return. What can’t be denied is the legacy he will leave behind: He’s still trending on Twitter and making headlines in the Celebrity Truth and the Wall Street Journal alike.