We have the same goal for every single client. For every single project.
Create something that connects with your audience in a meaningful way.
That is it. It’s that simple.
And how does one do that you may be asking? Especially when that arguably should be the goal of every business and creative that exists? By designing for the emotional connection you want to build with your audience, at every step of the way.
Let’s break that down.
For us, this starts at the very beginning, during our Creative Brief meeting. Our Creative Brief agenda has two goals:
Understand what your business does and for whom.
Understand how you want your customers to feel when they engage with your brand.
These two questions we use as our guiding light throughout the process. They are core to who you are as a business and where you want to grow. Startups by nature need to be flexible – they grow fast, and they discover what they are building along the way. But the emotional core almost never changes. It is the reason they exist to begin with.
When we think about the for whom we try to keep the specifics open and focused lightly on demographics and more so on psychographics. It’s helpful to know if we’re talking more to Gen Z vs Boomers as well as knowing their general emotional state when they encounter your brand. In most cases, it would be wildly inappropriate to design a bold, sarcastic, direct brand for a company that is working with people under distressing circumstances.
This first question allows us to set up the what and who of your brand. I’m not going to diminish the importance of understanding this first question. But it is at this stage that your brand is just another business selling a gadget or service. You are a shoe company for young women who are just getting started in running. You are a fintech company who is helping someone save to buy their first house. You are a career coach who helps new moms transition into new careers that better suit the next chapter of their life.
All of these are worthwhile businesses and important to know as we’re building your brand but as your business grows, this target audience and initial offerings will also continue to grow too. And how you grow is just as important as growing your business.
This is where question two, how do you want to make your customers feel, comes in and we sprinkle in our not-actually-magic magic.
At this stage, we start asking the soft and squishy questions. We let the conversation run into different tangents to understand at a deeper level the why. Why are you building this company? Why should this company exist today? How are you different from the brands that already exist? What is missing in the market if you don’t exist? It’s during this part of the conversation that our clients often smile and apologize for taking several left turns, all the while we’re taking notes furiously.
Do you want to be friendly as in your high school science teacher who inspired you to go into microbiology? Or friendly as in your local barista who always knows your order?
Because often when we ask clients initially, “how do you want your customers to feel when they engage with your brand” we get very surface level responses – they want to be cool and bold and friendly. These are good places to start but we want to ramp up the tension (most CPG brands want to be all of these). We want to get more specific. Do you want to be friendly as in your high school science teacher who inspired you to go into microbiology? Or friendly as in your local barista who always knows your order?
And now you might be asking yourself, how does this actually help my brand as we scale and grow?
If you know who your audience is and why they come to you, and how they feel when they engage with your brand, it’s like a picture coming into focus. You can intentionally craft a customer experience, ensuring consistency at every step from marketing to sales to business development to employee experience. Each of these touch points are an opportunity to build trust with your customers and employees (not something that should be overlooked by young companies).
Thus, consistency leads to trust and trust leads to brand loyalty. And finally, brand loyalty leads to scaling.
We aren’t going to try to make the claim that great branding is a silver bullet. But in our opinion it’s the closest thing that exists in the business world. That may be a bold statement (on brand) and definitely deserving of a full blog of its own, but when branding is taken seriously, it’s the anchor in a storm, the guiding light in the dark, the wind beneath your wings. Okay, but seriously it’s something that once you’ve established the foundation, you can use that as your continual gut check. But that only works if you’ve built a brand with an intentional emotional hook. A brand, in other words, that makes you feel something.
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Interested in chatting about design, branding, or even just cool shit?
Contact us at hello@twolipscreative.com
About The Author
Olivia Wisden is the Founder + CEO of TwoLips Creative. She has worked with dozens of brands over the years ranging from city initiatives to product launches and beyond. When she’s not fan-girling over the design team’s illustrations she can probably be found reading a novel or exploring her new home of Chicago.
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