How to communicate your brand story — A case study about finding your why, how and what

Whether you’re a product, a brand or an organisation, articulating to your customers and stakeholders what you’re all about can sometimes be difficult. Making your comms compelling, easy to understand and appropriate for different audiences is not easy; and although your visual strategy performs a large part of this, your messaging is what provides the purpose and detail.

We recently worked with Lifting Limits — a charitable organisation who challenge gender stereotyping and promote gender equality through education. Having connected with their Founder, Caren, through Media Trust we took a ‘why, how, what’ approach to help her find a way to tell Lifting Limit’s story.

1. WHY — Start with your purpose

Lifting Limits’ aim is to free all children from the limiting effects of gender stereotyping. It’s inspiring — which makes it a great purpose and place for us to begin.

You may know your purpose by another name — perhaps your vision or goal. It may only be internal facing for now, but start by agreeing 1–2 sentences that you believe articulates this, and don’t worry if it seems broad or indirect — it’s not the detail of ‘how’ or ‘what’ yet.

2. HOW — Determine your tone of voice

Establishing a tone of voice is a task within itself but sometimes it isn’t something you have the time or resources to fully explore. With Lifting Limits we were able to help ‘shortcut’ this for their current needs with a workshop.

The below questions are a useful place to start:

• What are your values? There’s likely a handful of words or phrases that you have when describing your brand or organisation — positive, honest, factual for example.
• What’s your personality? This is similar to the above, however think a little more about the delivery. It’s sometimes useful to consider this on a scale — are you more fun or serious, verbose or succinct, silly or wise?
• Where do you (the Founder) fit in? For some brands and organisations, the founder is the tone of voice, whereas for others the product/service is distinct. In all cases it’s important you feel your tone of voice is authentic and comfortable, however if it’s also ‘you’ then you need to make sure that this is aligned.

3. WHAT — Identify your barriers so you can find a solution

Lifting Limits needed a more succinct way of communicating the importance of their work and the effects gender stereotyping has on children and in later life. We summarised the challenges as follows:

• The ‘enemy’ of gender stereotyping is not a specific or immediate outcome, it’s a slow burn
• The action taken is a removal (of gender stereotyping), rather than an addition of something else
• Some audiences think gender equality has been achieved or don’t understand the role stereotyping plays in perpetuating inequality, so the receptiveness and level of info required to make the message land varies

These combined made it difficult to:

• Convey urgency / present an emotive case compared other causes
• Point to tangible results
• Talk in a concise way (without the need for context and background)

Once you’ve identified your barriers, it’s much easier to reframe your comms to work with rather than against them.

For Caren we agreed the following: We talk about Lifting Limits as a movement, rather than a solution.

+Bonus round: WHO — Tailoring for your audience(s)

Although the why, how and what will remain similar across most of your comms, we wanted to help with some tailoring for when Caren was talking to different people and in different ways — whether this was a verbal pitch to potential funders, or a written intro about their programme to a lead educator. Some key questions to consider after identifying your audience groups are:

• What is their knowledge / interest level?
• What will they want to know / what is it that will grab their attention?
• And what will they need reassuring / more information about?

From there, we devised a hierarchy structure for each regarding what to say first for impact, what should follow, and how much further info should be included.