When organizations consider a rebrand, visual elements like the logo, color palette, and typography are all clear areas of focus. But to ensure all that work makes the greatest impact on your organization and its connection to members, you can’t neglect your brand messaging.

Your messaging system is the backbone of your brand. It constitutes the suite of words, statements and attributes chosen to reflect and support your organization’s identity. Your website copy, how you greet members at events, and every social media caption are all products of a messaging system. 

When your messaging is in alignment, it’s a powerful tool for your organization. However, if your messaging isn’t cohesive, your current and prospective members and internal teams will lose trust in your organization because there’s no clarity or consistency in how you express who you are.

I recently had a discussion with one of our messaging experts, Catherine Warmerdam, on the most important way you can communicate the value of your brand. Here is an edited version of that conversation. 

Phil Tretheway: I was preparing for a branding presentation with a group of outside partners for a client, and was surprised to find that the heart of what I really wanted to present was the messaging. 

Being a classically trained graphic designer, it’s not natural for me to skip over the visual part. Do you feel much pressure with your work building the core of an organization’s brand?

Catherine Warmerdam: Yes! That initial attempt to distill a company or an organization into just a few memorable words or sentences is deceivingly difficult. For me, balancing brevity and complexity is the hardest part. That’s when it becomes so important to be precise with one’s words, because those words have to support an entire brand. 

I’m curious how the strength of the messaging affects your visual approach. Is it hard to design around a weak or uninspiring message?

PT: The worst thing is to work on a visual identity with no messaging, because that’s just decorating and making things pretty. To do our best work, the design needs to solve a problem and achieve a goal. It needs to say something. Hence the need for messaging. 

When we develop a brand for a client it starts with three things: who they are, who they serve, and their message platform. Nobody should start on a project without a clear understanding of the organization, the demographics of the audience they’re trying to serve, and a message to communicate. 

I love building a brand that has a well-defined character, tone, style, and core messaging (what, why, purpose). When do you start defining an organization’s messaging system? 

CW: Pretty much immediately. But first I want to build a really thorough understanding of what they have in place already — and I want to know the ‘why’ behind everything. So there are lots of questions in the beginning. 

That initial dialogue also yields other useful information. For example, if a client is clinging to a ‘we’ve-always-done-it-that-way’ approach — even if it’s not working for them — that’s sometimes a signal that they’re looking for an easy fix. Or it could mean that the person who brought you in is looking to make a change, but maybe their boss isn’t convinced it’s necessary. 

Have you encountered that before? How did you handle it?

PT: I was recently reading “The Global Identity of Cities” by Brookings, which was a fascinating report on best practices for branding a city or region. Spoiler alert: the report’s findings and process are highly applicable to branding organizations. One of the early points they make is that for a project to be successful, your stakeholders must embrace the need for change. I think this is critical. 

Most executives I’ve worked with have been on board with the branding projects, though as we work through the process, they gain an even deeper appreciation for what we’re doing. Once we get into the discovery questions and past talking points, and really dive into their goals and vision, they realize that we’re not just making a logo and color palette. We’re here to understand at a deep level who they are, what they do, and where they’re going. Then, we translate that into words and visuals. 

Once they start to feel heard, they see the potential for how much we can help them with their job. I really love this phase of the project. What questions do you like to ask as part of your discovery?

CW: For messaging, I like to first ask about the audience, because it all begins and ends with who you’re trying to reach. I want to know as much as I can about them. From there, I ask the client, ‘What do you want that audience to know? And what do you want them to do?’ Just those couple of questions can yield a lot of helpful information from which I can begin to build some messaging elements. 

What questions do you ask to kick off a project?

PT:  I ask very similar, basic core questions. At least that’s where I start. After those beginning questions it’s a conversation, and asking the right questions to pull out deeper truths is an art form we have become good at over the years. 

These initial conversations are one of my favorite parts of a project. Sometimes I feel like an annoying 4-year-old who is asking why again and again. Other times I feel like a therapist, guiding the client through a progressively deeper conversation about why they do what they do and who they do it for. 

CW: In the end, I feel it’s all about getting clarity on who you are, what you offer, and who you serve and translating that into the language of your audience. 

Your messaging is like the invisible glue that holds your brand together. If it’s not strong and durable, the brand doesn’t hold together like it should. 

Why Your Branding Project Begins With Messaging

Messaging isn’t just a component of your branding initiative. It’s the foundation of every element that expresses your organization’s value to its most important audience. 

But beyond messaging, you need to ensure your organization gains a complete brand system to support its goals. With these tools in place, you don’t just provide your organization with a clearer means of forming a connection with current and future members. You create a greater sense of belonging and ownership within your internal teams that builds confidence for the future.

If your brand is falling short of communicating all your organization does for members, let’s talk. We can help your organization get where it needs to be.

To build a strong emotional connection with your audience, you need a comprehensive resource that enables you to create a meaningful and cohesive narrative over time. More than a recipe outlining color and text options, you need the support of a robust and sophisticated brand system.

With a brand system, you gain a toolbox that’s built to ensure your organization speaks to its audiences in a way that saves both time and money. Rather than starting from scratch with each new marketing project, a brand system gives your organization a head start.

Understanding the Benefits of a Brand System

The details that constitute how your brand looks are typically outlined in a logo guide or brand guidelines. These documents perform the vital work of ensuring the visual elements of your brand remain consistent across every platform.

By contrast, a brand system provides a more comprehensive framework. It encompasses who you are and how to verbally and visually communicate that to your audiences. This covers not only colors and typography, but also your brand’s tone of voice, messaging, values, and more. 

A strong brand system informs nearly every aspect of your organization. Plus, it ensures each department has the tools to deliver messaging that’s consistent, clear, and scalable in a way that resonates with your audience.

Core Elements of an Effective Brand System

When you work with the right agency, you gain a partner to help define and articulate your values, audience, and what you do for members. These elements form the building blocks of a strong brand system.

A brand system hinges on four elements:

• Purpose: Your vision, values, and mission. Who are you? Why do you exist?
• Audience: Who are you serving? What specific population are you appealing to?
• Messaging: How do you communicate with your target audience?
• Visuals: What are the visual tools to tell your story?

How Brand Systems Accelerate Marketing Initiatives

Once your brand system is established, your organization gains a vital resource to use over and over for any aspect of your marketing. Plus, you gain a valuable ally that resolves common problems plaguing organizations needing to connect with a new generation of members.

Fundamentally, a brand system’s greatest value is its ability to deliver a head start for your team, making your marketing faster and more effective. Imagine you’re a professional cyclist, but every time you prepare for a race, you have to rebuild your bicycle from scratch. Then, once you’ve assembled everything you need, you can jump on and start the race. If you have everything you need for your bicycle already in place, you start racing that much faster.

With a brand system, your team starts marketing projects with everyone working from a common truth. You know who you’re talking to and your organization’s role. By starting each project from that baseline, your marketing team doesn’t waste time rebuilding what defines your brand. Instead, you’re free to put your energy into creating more impact and value for members.

Core Benefits of a Brand System for Member-Driven Organizations

For member-driven organizations, a well-defined brand system provides the following benefits:

Unified Identity: Organizations are made up of members with diverse backgrounds and varying interests. A strong brand system helps unify your members with a shared identity, values, and messaging. With an established brand system, you create a common thread that binds members together. 

Credibility: A brand system that is well executed over time enhances your organization’s credibility to new and future members and prospective sponsors. A consistent presentation shows that your organization takes its mission seriously and is dedicated to effectively representing its members.

Advocacy, Influence, and Public Perception: A brand system enables your organization to shape how it is perceived by the public, including policymakers, industry leaders, and potential members. Your ability to create a positive impression to a general audience impacts your association’s effectiveness and reach. A unified visual and messaging identity establishes trust with stakeholders and enhances your ability to rally members around your cause.

Member Engagement: A well-developed brand that resonates with members gives them something to be loyal to and rally around. It can create a sense of belonging among the association’s members.

Partnerships and Sponsorships: Events and marketing materials presented from a strong brand system attract potential partners and sponsors that are aligned with your organization’s values. 

Event Promotion: Events, webinars, and conferences provide a valuable lifeline between your organization and its members. A brand system ensures all content associated with these events retains a consistent look and feel to reinforce your overall organization’s identity and message.

Strategic Foundation: As your organization evolves, a brand system provides a strategic foundation. For example, should your organization grow excited about a new idea like a video campaign on social media, you can bring every detail back to your brand’s core character, tone, and central messaging. Does the project reinforce these details? When you tie every initiative to the same strategic foundation, the results are much stronger.

The Bigger Picture of a Brand System

When comparing logo guidelines versus brand guidelines and brand systems, it’s easy to linger on the details. Ultimately, a brand system doesn’t need to document a specific number of elements to give your marketing an advantage. Your goal is to create a comprehensive resource that empowers your organization to connect with its audience in an impactful way.

At the same time, a brand system enables your teams to act from a place of complete understanding of your organization’s identity, as well as who it serves and why it exists. A brand system is a tangible resource. But it’s only powerful when consistently leveraged.

It’s important to ensure your team is aligned and understands how your brand system makes their lives easier and simplifies solutions to organizational challenges. With a brand system in place, your organization gains an ongoing checkpoint for everything it does.

For member-driven organizations, a brand is among the most complex yet valuable initiatives you can undertake. When navigated successfully, your organization enriches its bond with current members while establishing new connections with the next generation.

However, without the proper support, even the most well-executed branding efforts will fall flat. Your CEO or Executive Director (we’ll use CEO in this article) plays a pivotal role in ensuring a brand rollout is effective and embraced by your members and organization. But what is the right level of involvement from your CEO?

The answer sounds a little like Goldilocks: Not too much, and definitely not too little. Ultimately, you need your leadership engaged with a branding project at specific times for its success and the long-term stability of your organization.

Why Branding Is Essential for Member-Driven Organizations

Even the most recognizable brands in the world shift with the times and their audience’s expectations. Your organization is no different. By 2025, Millennials will make up 75% of the workforce. While your new audience still needs the resources your organization provides, they engage with your brand in distinctively different ways.

Millennials are digital natives who prioritize strong design as a means of evaluating the services they use. Strategic branding ensures you tell the full story of your organization in a way that clearly communicates all you have to offer. 

Plus, good branding doesn’t just build a stronger connection with prospective members. It inspires and revitalizes your organization and the membership it serves.

Steps for a Successful Branding Project

Securing just the right level of involvement of your CEO is key to a successful and smooth branding initiative. When you work with a skilled agency partner, a branding project progresses through the following stages:

• Discovery: Collaborative research into your brand, its history, and what it should communicate.
• Design: Conceptualizing your visual identity and bringing it to life. 
• Refinement: Collaborating with your design agency to ensure the best possible outcome.
• Execution: Delivery of a new brand system and all related collateral.
• Roll Out: Evanglizing your organization’s new brand internally and externally.

For the best results, you need your CEO to be fully engaged during the discovery phase of the project and then advocate for the branding after the work is complete. Apart from weighing in at key checkpoints, your CEO needs to allow you and your team to do what they do best.

How CEO Involvement Impacts a Branding Project

If your branding process doesn’t strike the right balance with your leadership, it can impact your project in the following ways:

The Disengaged CEO

If your CEO isn’t involved in key points of a branding project, they won’t be invested in its results. Rather than enabling the branding to act as a transformative undertaking that benefits the whole organization, a disengaged CEO will see it as just a marketing project. 

As your communications reflect your new branding, members grow confused as your leadership fails to deliver consistent messaging. Soon, your organization is back where it started.

The Over-Involved CEO

CEOs are busy and consistently pressed for time. If they insist on remaining involved with every step of the project, your schedule will slip as meetings are delayed to accommodate your CEO’s crowded schedule. Plus, CEOs are not branding experts and lack the expertise to micromanage each stage of the project. 

4 Tips for Striking the Right Balance With Your CEO for a Branding Project

A strong brand acts as a guide for how your organization verbally and visually expresses its identity. With these four tips, you can ensure your CEO remains aligned with your branding project at key steps.

1. Secure CEO Investment Before the Project Starts

Gaining buy-in from your leadership for a branding project encompasses more than budget approval. Underscore that the issues with your brand are an organizational problem — not a marketing issue. Your CEO should understand that a robust brand platform provides the solution by communicating the full story of your organization and its value.

Ultimately, you’re coming to an agency like ours because we solve problems with your brand. We’re not decorators. We’re rebuilding your brand from the ground up so it serves your unique challenges.

2. Ensure Engagement From Leadership as Work Begins

During the Discovery stage, you need to maintain involvement from your CEO, leadership team, and board. These people have passion, history, and vision for your organization that your creative team will translate to the building blocks of an engaging brand platform.

Your CEO needs to feel heard in a way that allows them to feel invested and trust the branding project is in good hands. It is critical that they sign off on all strategy documents, as they will be used as the foundation throughout the process.

3. Consult Your CEO for Key Decision Points

As the project progresses, bring your CEO back to review messaging and concept presentations from your design agency. Make sure you provide the correct context for feedback, buy reviewing the strategy documents from the discovery stage. Incorporating feedback from your leadership is crucial to ensuring the work reflects your organization. Plus, these meetings enable your CEO to remain invested in a focused way throughout the branding process.

4. Bring Your CEO to the Front for the Brand Rollout

As marketing director, you’re responsible for much of the hard work that goes into a successful branding project. To reflect that involvement, your CEO may want you to present the project’s results to your organization. Instead, your CEO should act as the face of the rollout. Enabling your organization’s brand to come from the CEO positions the project as an organization-wide initiative—not a marketing campaign.

Leadership sets the tone for how your internal teams view the results of a branding project. During the rollout of the rebranded Associated General Contractors of California (AGC-CA), the CEO had a vision for breathing new life into the brand to celebrate its centennial. By offering his full support of the project which included presenting the new brand to the organization, AGC maximized the impact of its rebranding effort.  

During the rollout of our branding project for Visit Sacramento, the organization’s leadership engaged us to present the new brand to their staff, board, and partners. To emphasize the importance of the initiative, the CEO introduced it as crucial for everyone in the organization to embrace. With that kind of support, the new brand was in the right position to reach its full potential.

Branding Projects Thrive When Organizations are Unified 

Your CEO acts as a manifestation of the brand and the organization they are steering. Engaging your leadership throughout a branding project gives you a critical advantage in ensuring its success. 

But conversations dictating the right role for your boss can be challenging. As you begin pursuing a branding project, you don’t have to navigate these potentially rough waters alone. When you’re working with the right design agency, you gain an expert third-party opinion on how involved your boss should be to secure a successful project. If this sounds like the kind of work that would benefit your organization and its future, we should talk.

A successful website brings many moving parts into alignment. While an intuitive and appealing design will look great and enhance the user experience, your brand can’t be captured by visuals alone. To draw the strongest connection with your audience, you need the words on the page to clearly express the value of your organization. 

Every component of your website expresses your brand’s voice, but you need a skilled writer who can put all your organization has to offer into words. Even if your background is steeped in communications with extensive experience in public relations, you can’t replace the value of an outside marketing perspective. 

I recently had a discussion with one of our messaging experts, Catherine Warmerdam, on the importance of adding a fresh outside voice to a website project. Here is an edited version of that conversation. 

Phil Tretheway: I was working on a website project yesterday and lamenting that the client didn’t opt to bring in a writer. It elevates the whole project when we have someone to collaborate with at that level. Do clients often have trouble seeing the value of bringing in an outside writer?

Catherine Warmerdam: Unfortunately, I do run across this issue occasionally. Often a client needs to be convinced that having a writer at the table from the inception of the project will make both the process and the final product stronger. Sometimes the reason is cost: they think they’ll save money by producing website copy in-house.

But in my experience, even if you do save money, internal staff rarely have the bandwidth to focus their attention on such a time-intensive task. So, it ends up slowing down the project. 

Phil: Yeah, it’s not uncommon for us to get 75% through a project on time and on budget just to get derailed by missing copy. People consistently underestimate how much time and thought needs to go into developing great written content. Then it gets rushed and doesn’t rise to the occasion. We can design a strategic and beautiful project, but words are a big part of the equation.

Catherine: Lots of projects get stalled when the copy isn’t completed in parallel to the design. One way to resolve this is to integrate the copywriting timeline into the overall project timeline; it shouldn’t be an afterthought. Writers typically have a good sense of how long it will take to research, write, and edit their work. They’re in the best position to suggest realistic deadlines. 

In your experience, why do you think writers sometimes get overlooked on these types of projects? 

Phil: Hiring a writer is seen as a luxury. Especially if the client has communications, public relations, or marketing experience, they may think they can do it on their own. But writing for a press release and a website are very different skills in my experience. Don’t you think?

Catherine: I agree completely. Press releases, for the most part, follow a certain format and usually strike the same business-y tone. They don’t need much personality. But website content is a different animal. There’s so much more interplay between the words and the design, and that requires a lot of creative dialogue between the writer and the design team. At its best, it’s a very dynamic process that’s enhanced when a writer has a good sense of design.

So, how would you persuade a client to get on board with hiring a copywriter?

Phil: Sometimes it’s a simple reality check of, “Really? You really want to and have the time to write all of this copy yourself?” As you said, website writing is a demanding, time-intensive task.

We push it pretty hard for our clients to be realistic about the resources it will take to plan, write, and revise the copy—especially if the deadline is tight. More important than all of that logistical stuff is the perspective.

An outside writer doesn’t come with all of the internal history and bias a staff writer does. They have the training and time to approach the project with an outside lens, analyze the situation, study the audience, and write with a fresh, strategic perspective. We often use the analogy of trying to read the label from inside the jar.

I love collaborating with professional writers. How does your writing change when working with a designer versus on your own?

Catherine: I’d say that nearly all of my writing for clients gets some sort of design treatment eventually.

The projects usually fall into one of two camps: a back-and-forth process in which I get to interact with the design team as I’m writing and editing, or a linear process where my work gets handed off to a designer and we never talk. The interactive process nearly always yields a better product.

When collaborating with a designer, I can ask questions about the layout, the imagery, and the level of interactivity. All of these things influence how I write, especially the tone I adopt. It’s a beautiful thing when the words and the design help tell a complete story.

Phil: Agreed, our design work is always much stronger and more effective when developed in tandem with the messaging. When the design and messaging are aligned to solve the same problem in a symbiotic way, we get the best results for our clients.

Why Your Website Redesign Project Needs a Copywriter

Bringing on an expert copywriter to create your website copy isn’t an extravagance. It’s a means to optimize how well you express your organization’s value to a crucial audience. Instead of trying to shoehorn your website copy into the rest of your responsibilities, a copywriter allows you to protect your website project’s schedule — and its budget.

Plus, by incorporating an outside perspective, you gain a fresh set of eyes to see what your organization does and express its value in the most effective way. If your website is falling short of showing all your organization does for members, let’s talk. We can help your organization get where it needs to be.