For generations of movie fans, Star Wars’s tiny Jedi master, Yoda, is immediately recognizable for his peculiar syntax: “Anger, fear, aggression. The dark side are they.” It’s so identifiable that you might have even read that last sentence in Yoda’s scratchy, high-pitched voice.
You could say that Yoda has expertly developed brand messaging. He has a specific tone, repeated phrases and words, and a consistent message that spans several movies. Those, in turn, have made him a cultural touchstone.
In the marketing world, everyone’s striving to be like Yoda. Companies need a brand voice that people hear and immediately recognize. So, let’s dive into how you can make your brand stand out with your unique voice and messaging.
What is brand messaging?
Brand messaging is how your business uses specific words and phrases to convey your brand identity and value proposition to a target audience.
Brand messaging encapsulates your brand voice and tone, mission statement, brand values, and unique value proposition. It relies on the three Cs of brand messaging—clarity, consistency, and constancy—throughout social media posts, paid advertising, newsletters, and your website. Developing a strong brand messaging strategy will help foster a lasting connection between your customer base and your brand.
Internal vs. external brand messaging
While “messaging” might suggest interaction with the public, that’s not the whole story. External messaging speaks to your customers and audience, while internal messaging speaks to your team.
Internal brand messaging, or internal marketing, is just as important as your communication externally. In fact, effective messaging in your internal communications can provide a positive feedback loop between your brand identity and your team. You want your communication with your team to be clear, consistent, and constant, and the same should be true for external brand messaging.
That doesn’t mean they’ll be identical. Your internal brand messaging will likely be more familiar, conversational, and pertinent to the entire spectrum of work-related information—think catered lunch and learns, all-team meetings, and HR onboarding, for example. Your external brand personality might be more formalized since it focuses on selling products and services. Both can be conversational or formal, playful or serious, depending on your company’s brand identity as a whole.
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Components of brand messaging
Whether internal or external, your specific brand identity informs your brand messaging. For example, are you a company of serious technical experts or young-at-heart creatives? Ensuring you’ve developed the following components will help keep your brand messaging dialed-in and precise.
Mission statement
Your mission statement lays out how your company aims to improve customers’ lives. A clear mission statement tells customers what to expect from you and provides employees with direction and inspiration. This language can provide the framework for your overall brand messaging strategy.
Heyday Canning founder Kat Kavner succinctly conveys the essence of her brand on Shopify Masters, identifying how her soups and canned goods stand out from the competition: “There seemed to be an opportunity to take all of the good stuff about canned food—how convenient it is, being shelf stable—and create food for today’s consumer that knows great food and really values its great flavor and premium quality,” Kat says. “Maybe someone doesn’t always have the time to cook completely from scratch, and they could really benefit from the convenience of just grabbing a can out of their pantry.”
From this, a clear mission begins to emerge: Heyday Canning reinvents canned food by combining everyday convenience with premium flavor and quality, so it can offer a modern pantry staple for busy, food-loving consumers. This aligns the team around a shared purpose and makes it easy for customers to understand exactly what the brand stands for: convenience, quality, and an appetite for the contemporary.
Vision statement
Don’t confuse your mission statement with your vision statement. Both are essential components of your brand messaging. But while your mission statement focuses on concrete goals, your vision statement takes a broader view of your business’s purpose in the world. (Don’t have a vision statement? These examples can help you craft one.)
Athletic wear brand Gymshark’s website proclaims, “We exist to unite the conditioning community.” They further define conditioning as “everything we do to prepare for tomorrow.” With this vision statement, you get a sense of the company’s identity as strong, unifying, and focused on preparing for anything and everything. It’s a motivational message that they’ve turned into effective brand messaging.
Brand values
Brand values lie at the heart of both your mission and your vision. Uniting your customers through aligned values can be a powerful way to build and maintain loyalty.
Ecommerce soap company LastObject has made a name for itself as a low- or no-waste alternative to single-use cleaning and beauty products. Its conservationist and sustainable values influence nearly every aspect of its brand communication.
Brand voice
Everyone has a voice, even brands. Your brand’s voice includes the level of formality you use, your word choices, and your emotional resonance.
On the ecommerce site for Healthy Roots Dolls, you can find a blog post authored by Zoe, the company’s flagship doll. The rest of the website also uses a voice that reflects its brand values of supporting diversity and inclusivity. You’ll find plenty of first-person testimonials, pictures of real girls with their dolls, and friendly, youthful language from your best “curlfriend.” Even if every post or email doesn’t come from Zoe directly, that same youthful and inviting voice permeates all their communications.
Creating a style guide, including brand guidelines on voice and tone, can help your team keep your brand messaging consistent.
Value proposition
In your value proposition, you dig into why potential customers would choose your particular product or service over another. What does your product provide that the competition does not? The answer to that question is going to help you frame key messages to consumers.
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Take Bruvi, an ecommerce company that provides coffee and tea in biodegradable pods. Its brand promise is the convenience of a coffee pod machine but with high-quality taste. That proposition guides the messaging across its website, emphasizing what Bruvi provides that its competitors don’t.
How to develop your brand messaging
- Conduct competitor research
- Draft a positioning statement
- Observe market trends
- Survey your audience
- Identify your values, vision, and mission
- Create a style guide
- Come up with a tagline
At its heart, brand messaging is how you express your brand to the public and your internal team. It’s the convergence of your company’s goals, purpose, audience, and vibe. Developing your own brand messaging framework will guide the growth of your company and the development of your products. Here are some suggestions to help tailor your brand messaging to your specific market:
1. Conduct competitor research
Start by identifying a few brands in your niche and conducting a competitive analysis. What tone do they use for their messaging? What promises are they making to customers? Pay close attention to their website copy, social media bios, product descriptions, and even customer reviews.
Then ask yourself: What’s missing from their messaging? What gaps can you fill? Pinpoint what makes your brand different. Maybe it’s your origin story, your values, your product quality, or your customer experience. This research will not only help you stand out but also help you avoid repeating what everyone else is already saying.
2. Draft a positioning statement
Once you know where you stand in relation to your competitors, it’s time to define what you bring to the table. A brand positioning statement is a formal write-up of your value proposition: who your target audience is, what you offer, how it’s different, and why it matters. Think of it as your brand’s North Star. You can use a product positioning statement template to guide you through the writing process.
The key is to be specific and honest about what makes your brand worth a potential customer’s time and attention. This statement becomes the backbone of your messaging strategy, helping you speak consistently across your website, social media, ads, and beyond.
3. Observe market trends
What products are your competitors rolling out? What are the trendy colors, buzzwords, and features you want to either embrace as cool or stay away from if the market has become oversaturated? For example, after decades of primary colors being the go-to for kids’ toys, there was a move toward neutral colors, followed by a backlash against “sad beige.” Decide for yourself what defines your company, but know what’s out there to make savvy choices.
4. Survey your audience
There’s no better source of information for what your audience likes and needs than talking to your target market directly. Wondering if you should emphasize your recycling policies or your sustainable sourcing? Ask for comments on a social media post or conduct a more official survey. There are so many ways to ask questions and get feedback. Your existing customer base can help you understand how to reach more people like them.
5. Identify your mission, vision, and values
As outlined above, your mission, vision, and values are key to a strong brand messaging framework. Brainstorm with your team to create specific, tailored wording for each item. The more you understand the basics, the easier it’ll be to shape your messaging internally and externally.
6. Create a style guide
A style guide will help support the second C of brand messaging: consistency. It’s not enough to identify what’s important to and about your brand. You also need to know how to express that in a consistent way over time so that your audience can learn to identify and trust your specific brand.
7. Come up with a tagline
Once you have all the key elements of your brand identity, creating a tagline adds an element to your brand messaging that you can use easily across communication channels. Coming up with your own slogan is easy once you have a bit of inspiration.
Brand messaging FAQ
What is an example of a brand message?
“America runs on Dunkin’” is an example of a brand message that conveys an emotional connection (a unified America) and a value proposition (likening coffee to fuel)—all while being catchy.
What are the 3 Cs of brand messaging?
Clarity, consistency, and constancy are the three Cs of brand messaging, meaning your messaging should be easy to understand, should stay the same across channels and marketing campaigns, and should remain steady over time.
What is the difference between tagline and brand messaging?
Brand messaging is how your business communicates, using specific words and phrases, to convey your brand values and value proposition to a target audience. A tagline is one specific phrase that defines your brand. Taglines are generally for the company itself, while slogans may be created to define a specific product or campaign. In fact, Nike’s tagline “Just Do It” started as a slogan in the 1990s but has become a tagline that’s synonymous with the company itself.
