Using Your Brand to Create Unique Content

A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, and/or other feature (e.g., Off-White and Off-White “quotes,” Coca-Cola and the Coke red, Bottega Venetta and its weave design) that identifies a company’s products or services and differentiates them from those of other companies.

Over the last three decades, practitioners and academics have developed many terms to help us better understand brands. For example, we now know what brands are more or less generally understood in the same way by consumers who have a certain image of the brands in their minds (brand image). The descriptive features that consumers use to describe these images are called brand attributes. We also know that marketers can play on this by assigning certain attributes—personality traits—to brands (brand personality). Marketers also strive to position their brand in a market in a way that is distinct and valued by consumers (brand positioning).

The main messages here are that brands serve to differentiate products and services, and, in our case, content created online, from other companies; that consumers form images of brands in their minds; and that, as digital marketers, we should strategically think of how to use brands to position ourselves, our products, our services and, importantly, our content.

Hence, once you have developed an understanding of the codes used around content creation in a market and how your competitors are uniquely positioned, the next step is to create content that will uniquely speak to consumers. Ideally, you will want this content to reflect who you are as a company, i.e., to reflect your brand.

Let’s take the example of brand personalities. Aaker (1997) identified five dimensions to the personality of brands:

• sincerity (honest, genuine, cheerful)
• excitement (daring, spirited, imaginative)
• competence (reliable, responsible, dependable, efficient)
• sophistication (glamorous, pretentious, charming)
• ruggedness (tough, strong, outdoorsy, rugged)

We would expect that brands that aim to show a rugged image would create content differently from those aiming for a sophisticated one. Think, for example, of the latest Jeep ad that you might have watched and how it compares with the latest Mercedes ad that you have seen. Over time, interactions between consumers and touchpoints lead them to develop an image of your brand. Representing your brand in ways that align with the image you want to create in consumers’ minds is thus central.

Hence, to create unique content, ask yourself: What does my brand stand for? What do I want consumers to think of when they hear my brand name? How can my content properly showcase my brand?

Take Wendy’s, for example, which has become infamous for its sassy, cheeky, in-your-face, bordering-on-trolling social media presence. It, for example, challenged a teen to get a million retweets in exchange for a lifetime of chicken nuggets (the #nuggsforcarter campaign). It created a Spotify playlist taking shots at its competitors (as the company regularly does on Twitter). All of which, according to Wendy’s Chief Marketing Officer Kurt Kane, “is a natural extension of the Wendy’s brand Dave Thomas founded in 1969” (Fast Company).