What is Your Brand’s Verbal Identity, and Why Does it Matter?
When you think of your favorite brand, what comes to mind? Is it their products? What about logos? Maybe you remember a tagline. Hopefully, that brand evokes a feeling. This doesn’t mean that, say, Nike should make you feel “happy” or “secure”. But you might associate the Nike brand with “quality” or “reliability”.
If you think of any of these things, it’s not a coincidence. It’s the result of a sophisticated brand strategy. There are a lot of components of successful brand strategy, but for simplicity’s sake we can say the key ingredients are:
Visual Identity
Verbal Identity
Communication Strategy
Verbal identity is what you say about your brand, how you say it, and who you say it to. It’s the foundation of how you tell your story to the world. Getting clear on it empowers you to communicate confidently, consistently, and coherently.
At a core level, your brand is who you are and what you do. Your branding is how you communicate that. So let’s dive in and learn about what goes into your brand verbal identity.
Contents
What is Verbal Identity?
Your brand’s verbal identity is a system for expressing who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters. It’s a descriptive framework for communicating to both external and internal audiences your mission, your core values, and your value proposition.
It’s also a prescriptive framework for aligning your brand’s goals and aspirations. It’s both a document of where you are AND where you want to be.
And it’s more than a document, as well. Again, successful verbal identity development will yield a system for expressing your brand. This is scalable, repeatable, and canonical.
“Your brand’s verbal identity is a system for expressing who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters.”
Establishing a verbal identity requires a scaffolded approach; you start from the middle and build outward. Each successive component builds on the previous:
Mission
Positioning
Messaging
Clarity on and documentation of these will inform everything from market and audience identification to communication guidelines. Let’s break down each component.
Mission Statement
Your brand’s mission statement is a simple but powerful statement. It succinctly encapsulates what drives your brand. And while your mission statement will typically be fairly broad, it needs to be specific enough to leave an impression. “Our mission is to increase shareholder value” is not a good mission statement, even if that is an overarching goal of your organization.
Let’s look at the example of Nike: “Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.”
That doesn’t say anything specific about what they do, but it does offer a guiding principle that can always be referred back to. Any initiative, any messaging can be placed against this statement to see if it aligns.
One way to jumpstart crafting your brand’s mission statement is to think about your vision. Try completing this sentence:
“We envision a world where…”
It might seem corny, but it’s a powerful method of working backwards by identifying your brand’s ultimate goal.
Positioning Statement
With your mission statement locked, you can begin to build out your positioning. At its most basic, your positioning should reflect the following:
Who your brand is
What your brand does
Who it does it for
Why it matters
How your brand is different
Ultimately, defining those 5 key facets of your brand will produce your brand north star, which you will distill in writing into a positioning statement.
Undertaking a positioning exercise gives you the opportunity to get clarity on the relationship between your brand and your audience. It bridges the gap between what your brand does and why it matters to your audience. Without this, your brand runs the risk of communicating inconsistently or inaccurately about itself. Or, worse yet, communicating accurately—to the wrong audience. When real dollars and strategic goals are on the line, it’s critical to have a clear brand identity guided by a positioning statement.
“When real dollars and strategic goals are on the line, it’s critical to have a clear brand identity guided by a positioning statement.”
A quick way to get started with positioning is to answer the following prompts:
We are a _____
Which does _____
To help _____
This deceptively simple exercise will help you express what, exactly, your brand does and who it does it for. Ideally, this will also drill down to your value proposition.
Your brand’s value proposition is what sets it apart from the competition. It comprises not just what you do, but what benefit you offer your audience. This is, by its nature, specific. If your company makes athletic sneakers, your value proposition likely won’t be relevant to, say, dentists looking to improve customer retention.
Speaking of athletic sneakers, let’s look at Nike’s positioning statement:
“For athletes in need of high-quality, fashionable athletic wear, Nike provides customers with top-performing sports apparel and shoes made of the highest quality materials. Its products are the most advanced in the athletic apparel industry because of Nike's commitment to innovation and investment in the latest technologies.”
As you can see, it’s significantly more specific and grounded than their mission statement. It speaks to what they do, who they do it for, and why it matters. As any successful positioning statement should, it guides Nike’s messaging.
Brand Messaging
While there are many components to a successful brand messaging strategy, the primary goal of brand messaging is to provide standards for communication across your organization.
Again, taking a scaffolded approach, you should identify 3-5 keywords. These can be core values, key benefits, or guiding descriptors of your brand. Use your keywords to build out three layers of brand messaging:
Tagline: One or two sentences that express your brand ethos.
Elevator pitch: A short statement you can use to quickly explain your brand externally, for example to someone you just met at a mixer.
Water cooler description: A short statement you can use to quickly explain your brand internally, for example to a new hire.
Once again, let’s look at Nike for a real-world example:
Tagline: Just do it. (One of the most iconic taglines in marketing history)
Elevator pitch: Our mission is what drives us to do everything possible to expand human potential. We do that by creating groundbreaking sport innovations, by making our products more sustainably, by building a creative and diverse global team and by making a positive impact in communities where we live and work.
Water cooler description: At NIKE, Inc., we see a world where everybody is an athlete—united in the joy of movement. Driven by our passion for sport and our instinct for innovation, we aim to elevate human potential. Whether our job is designing the ultimate sneaker or coding a revolutionary app, we’re united by the same mission: to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.
In each case, their language is intentional and focused. And remember, this messaging is a tool: It’s not written once and slapped on a website to collect cobwebs. Anyone communicating on behalf of Nike can (and should) reference these statements to ensure they’re always on brand and on message.
Another crucial facet of your brand’s messaging framework is establishing your “brand voice”. This encompasses the specific tone of voice you use, as well as how your brand keywords tie into and support all messaging.
We typically like to plot this information in a table or matrix, showing how each keyword informs a specific tone of voice and communication style:
Setting standards and guidelines is the central value of brand messaging. How those standards are executed in the real world is often referred to as “messaging strategy”, and we’ll dive into that in a future post.
Why Verbal Identity Matters
Most people are familiar with what we call “Visual Identity”: A logo, your brand colors, design standards, font families, iconography, and naming conventions. These are literally how the world sees your brand, after all. It’s hard to overstate the importance of a well-executed visual identity.
But as we’ve seen, it’s not the whole story. Successful visual identity should complement your brand’s verbal identity. You can think of them as how the world sees your brand and how it hears your brand, respectively.
Both are frameworks that empower your brand to:
Convey your brand’s personality
Connect with your brand’s audience
Provide cohesion and consistency across touch points (website, social media, collateral, etc.)
Differentiate your brand from competitors
Build and leverage brand equity
Ensure your communication strategy is effective (meets goals) and efficient (uses resources well)
These identity systems work in tandem to give structure to the way you express who you are, what you do, why you do it, who you do it for, and why it matters.
