Emily Monsell-Holden

Happy to talk you through it!

Happy to talk you through it!

I recommend regularly engaging in empathy mapping. It's a very useful exercise to step out of ‘us’ mode and getting under the skin of what your audiences really want. It sounds simple, but with the best will in the world, all companies become a little obsessed with what they want to say, rather than taking time to regularly check in to their audience’s mindset and really consider things from their perspective. Using empathy mapping on a regular basis (and then checking back to see how your proposition meets those needs) is a great way of staying more deeply connected with your customers, rather than always reducing them to 2D personas.

The value of genuinely engaging your employees with your brand vision cannot be overstated. If you have successfully collaborated with your people, and incorporated their insight into your brand, then this step isn’t that hard, but the key thing is to ‘engage’ rather than ‘tell’. Hold workshops with individual teams so that they can voice specific concerns, share ideas and really begin to understand how their individual roles contribute to the company’s brand positioning. When every individual and every team feels accountable for the brand experience, incredible things happen. Your culture becomes super-charged, your customer loyalty rates improve and everyone is begins moving in the same direction.

It's vital that you embed your brand messaging into your internal culture. This is key to a consistent, authentic brand experience across all touchpoints. Assuming you've revisted your messaging and think it's right, here are 3 ways to begin: 1) Make sure that your brand messaging is simple and concise. If it requires 5 pages to explain, it's not clear enough. 2) Find ways to connect every department to your vision – without exception. So that all employees know how their specific role helps to deliver on the overall brand and business objectives. 3) Make sure that you have tangible behaviours associated with your values, so that people are clear about how they are expected to show up. It empowers everyone to make a real difference.

A consistent understanding of what your brand stands for across your whole business is crucial, as is a sense of ownership in every team. Make sure that your brand is clearly (and simply) articulated, and that it's understood by everyone in your company, not just your Marketing team. Work hard to get down what's in the founder(s)' head and build it into recruitment and training so that as you grow, everyone who works in the company understands how it relates to their own specific roles and activities.