Most brands are boring.
I blame finance and legal, but really it’s just an unending list of competing priorities and not high level creative strategy.
When your brand has a good creative strategy you can easily answer yes to the question “Do we stand out?” or “Are we easily remembered?”
Remember this: Your product always sits on a shelf. That “shelf” might be in a physical store, a Google search page, or a social feed, but consumers are comparing you to everything else and they need a reason to remember. There are more social posts, ads, and content than ever before and it all sits in a sea of sameness.
The image below is a slide from a recent LinkedIn report on B2B branding. It features ads that all look like they’re from the same brand and yet there are 6 different companies represented here: AIG, Invesco, Morgan Stanley, United Health Group, T. Row Price, and American Express.
This uniformity is begging you to get a bit more sophisticated with your creative strategy. Or, you know, having some kind of creative strategy.
I’ll walk you through the steps we take at Social Fresh with our clients. This works across social, performance marketing, content, PR, and broad digital marketing. With a few helpful examples.
Key Takeaways
- Basic Is Not A Bad Word
- Move Past Demographics
- Consistent Small Details Build Brand
- Worldbuilding Wins: Constructing Narrative Architecture
- Consumers Keep Browsing: Give Them a Reason To Linger
- Don’t Be Afraid To Reinvent Identity or Voice
Basic Is Not A Bad Word
Identifying an enemy is a shortcut to better your brand creative. A big tip here is to make that contrast dead simple. Coinbase’s enemy is the messy banking system that never met a fee it didn’t like and takes 3 business days to transfer funds. A five year old gets this brand story. Their elegant brand copy? “The future of money.”
That says a lot in 4 small words.
Move past complicated or generic brand identity exercises. It’s crucial to distill your brand’s essence into a compelling, and short, messaging framework. Or, again, into a story a 5 year old can get.
Another good example is Mercury Bank. At first their brand message of “efficiency through technology” might seem basic. But, this core concept informs not just their visual identity, but their product development, customer service approach, and marketing narratives. Everything they do feels efficient and a better use of tech. Especially compared to their bloated and bumbling legacy bank competitors.
Another helpful process here is to conduct a brand archaeology study. You’re looking to identify differentiators that are core to the brand identity. Go beyond mission statements and include founder stories, customer language, and cultural inputs from all stakeholders. One creative strategy we did for a finance software client was largely developed from how the founder explained the business to her mom. Every story helps find these key insights.
A brand archeology study is worth the effort because of how it can help simplify every other element of your creative strategy.
Simplified brand messages should be emphasized internally too, so all team members understand and learn these fundamentals through regular work and the physical elements of your brand. This may include brand architecture, internal digital systems, or even print posters to enhance the brand message as a whole.
Move Past Demographics
While a dead simple brand message is crucial, it’s equally important to understand who you’re speaking to. Deep brand connections emerge from a comprehensive understanding of the customer. This requires a detailed understanding of the consumer pain points, behavioral data, psychographics, cultural trends, and in B2B firmographic data.
Drunk Elephant’s clinical, transparent branding speaks directly to a younger audience that values authenticity and efficacy. Their approach goes beyond age brackets, targeting a mindset that prioritizes informed consumption and ethical production.
Bright and fun, yet technical and medical. They’re the hip dermatologist you want to follow on TikTok.
It’s important to ensure you have or are creating a more detailed profile of your customer’s emotional and cultural priorities. Don’t stop at surface-level data. Don’t just use age, gender, and other demographic data. Conduct qualitative audience research through in-depth interviews and focus groups to uncover the hidden motivations and aspirations of your target audience.
One B2B software client we conducted audience research for didn’t realize one of their core messaging decisions made marketing decision makers feel safer and was a big driver of larger order conversions. That insight drove changes in their content and ad strategy, increasing their conversions even more.
This deep understanding will allow you to develop content pillars that truly resonate, creating a magnetic pull toward your brand.
Consistent Small Details Build Brand
In our distraction-filled digital carnival of a world today, smaller brand details delivered consistently across all platforms and mediums becomes an unlikely differentiator.
Mastercard’s sonic logo, a distinct melody used across all touchpoints from grocery checkout terminals to TV ads and social media content, creates a cohesive brand experience that transcends visual elements. It’s a powerful tool for brand recall and emotional connection. It does a simple but powerful job of evoking trust in financial transactions. Confirmation and success. Mastercard has also launched a haptic version of this same concept to reinforce their sonic branding or fill in when audio is not possible.
Start paying attention to the small details of how your brand comes into contact with the customer. This may mean sonic branding, haptic branding, custom typography, kinetic branding/animation (see Lego), a specific style of ASMR, brand worldbuilding, or even brand easter eggs. All of these details add up to large brand effects and trust building.
Worldbuilding Wins: Constructing Narrative Architecture
We all constantly hear “importance of storytelling” tips and tactics for branding. It’s unfortunately become overused and means very little.
I find the metaphor of architecture helpful and visually informative when we talk about brand story. The whole purpose of an architect is the make a building look cool in a cohesive way. That cohesion, holding everything together in a structurally and stylistic way… that’s story. That’s narrative. Guiding customers through your preferred journey becomes effortless when each step is clear, simple, and intuitively connected.
Liquid Death’s official mission is to “murder thirst.” But the real cohesive narrative they are building is to make their customers look cool at all costs. It permeates every aspect of their brand. Their irreverent approach, death-branded tallboy cans, and love of splashy PR stories challenge industry norms and consumer expectations.
This new level of storytelling requires a broader vision, a willingness to take more risks, and an investment in brand worldbuilding.
Consumers Keep Browsing: Give Them a Reason To Linger
Whether we’re scrolling social or browsing a group of homogenized products on the shelf at the grocery store, there is more competition than ever before. Fashion, design, and brand all go through seasons. Culture guides these movements and sometimes it’s hard to break out of a trend in your category, like the blue consulting aesthetic from the B2B ad examples above.
Brands like Fishwife are embracing a new level of visual disruption in response. Their bright, illustrative, and imaginative typeface approach stands out in both social feeds and on physical shelves, combating browsing fatigue and pattern recognition. Several newer grocery brands are adopting elements of this “dopamine design” in their own unique ways. This approach uses bold colors, playful typography, and engaging visuals to create a sense of excitement and novelty
What would it look like for your brand to visually disrupt itself and your competitors? Start by conducting an audit of your industry to identify overused design elements. This is one of our first steps when working with new creative strategy clients. Collaboration is a key step here as well, to gather inputs and inspiration from outside your industry. Look to artists, culture, creators, and social media trends. Challenge conventions and don’t restrict disruption to the traditional brand palette of logo, type, and color.
Don’t Be Afraid To Reinvent Identity or Voice
This is not an endorsement to authorize a new rebrand every 5 years. Many elements of your creative strategy don’t require hitting the eject button and completely restarting.
HubSpot’s evolution from a standard SaaS aesthetic to a more personality-driven brand is an ongoing shift I’ve been paying close attention to. They acquired and are building their own B2B podcast network. They’ve invested in brand ads and social media creators who are crafting edgier messages that appeal to younger and extremely online customers.
This makes sense when you realize one of HubSpot’s biggest growth segments is capturing startup customers. These customers move faster, are younger, and experience brands more through YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit than they do through billboards, blog posts, and webinars.
When consumer engagement shifts, so should your creative strategy. To stay ahead of the curve, implement a customer research report to understand not just your customer’s journey, but where they spend their time and attention away from your product or industry. Modular brand identities will allow for easier updates to your creative strategy and empower talented team members to move quickly to adapt.
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Today’s brands face unprecedented creative challenges. Competition on organic social channels, performance marketing channels, and across media is more intense than ever before. Mere attention-grabbing isn’t enough – your brand must stir emotions and spark imagination. This level of creativity isn’t just desirable; it’s essential for your brand’s survival and growth in a crowded marketplace.
Your brand has a unique story to tell. Tell it boldly, consistently, and in a medium that gets remembered.
Social Fresh is a creative strategy agency. If you’re interested in learning more about some of the strategies I’ve outlined in this article, reach out and say hello. Or sign up for my More Bad Ideas newsletter.