NEST
Challenging assumptions

Telling the right story

When your company auto-enrols you into a pension scheme, the default option is by NEST (the National Employment Savings Trust). 

It’s a sophisticated, high performance pension – but not everyone realised that at first. They heard “default” and made assumptions.

NEST Social media content
NEST Twitter feed

The pension fund
of choice

NEST asked us to tell their story clearly, with a content strategy that shows what a good choice a NEST pension represents.

NEST Blog
NEST Social media content x 2

Our programme of brand-led articles, tweets, animations and infographics highlights the real sophistication and flexibility of the NEST offer, from their ground-breaking investment methods to self-managed pensions.

Confirming that the NEST offer is anything but basic.

NEST Scale to succeed
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How to get more out of your vision and values

How to get more out of your vision and values

Like every element of your brand, your vision and values are tools. They’re not just there to sound nice in the annual report; they’re designed to be used. Use them right, and they can improve organisational efficiency, customer experience and employee engagement.

An organisation’s vision and values are usually defined along with the rest of the brand, when the brand is first created or as part of a rebrand. When we carry out a brand definition project, we aim to agree the vision and values with the client at an early stage, so they can inform other elements like the brand’s visual identity and tone of voice. But that’s not all your vision and values are useful for.

Your vision

Your vision is a brief statement of what your organisation aspires to achieve. You can think of it as expressing why your organisation exists.

For example, the Alzheimer’s Association’s vision is simply “A world without Alzheimer’s disease”. The Association exists to create that world. On the consumer side of things, Ikea’s vision is “To create a better everyday life for many people”.

A clear vision, and one that genuinely sums up the organisation’s reason for being, can do wonders for strategy and efficient decision-making.

The vision provides an end goal to focus strategic thinking. Short, medium and long-term goals can all be thought of as steps on the way to the ultimate goal of achieving the vision. It’s a constant reference point you can use to check that different parts of the strategy are all working together to steer the organisation in the same direction.

It can also help to simplify complex decisions. When you’re deep in the weeds of budgets, resources, risk assessments and other granular factors, having trouble identifying the right way forward, it helps to simplify the decision to “which option gets us closer to our vision?”

These are the uses we have in mind when we define visions for our clients. For example, Ghanaian investment bank GFX Prime’s vision is “To promote growth and sustainability for Ghana’s market, to achieve global recognition of its status and value”. And the Government Office for Science’s vision is “Government empowered by scientific evidence, policymaking that stands the test of time”.

A clear vision, can do wonders for strategy
and efficient decision-making

Illustration of people together

Values-based recruitment improves employee retention

Your values

Your values indicate what matters to you as an organisation. They’re principles that inform how every member of staff approaches everything they do at work. Naturally this means they inform your external audience’s experience of your organisation as well.

Good values set expectations. They let potential new employees know what to expect, and inform all employees what’s expected of them. Not all brands use their values in external communications, but they can also let customers and stakeholders know what to expect from their relationship with the organisation.

Values can do for your organisational culture what your vision does for your strategy. Values-based recruitment improves employee retention by making sure new employees are a good cultural fit for the teams they’re joining.

And values provide a starting point and a framework for resolving disagreements and conflicts. In our work for University College London Hospitals, staff told us that it was easier to open up about difficult topics like workplace bullying when they could frame the issue as “the way I was treated was not in line with our values”.

To make sure your values can be used in these ways, it’s important to define and communicate what living up to your values looks like in practice. Ideally, for each value, you should give two or three specific examples of everyday things employees can do to uphold that value, in their interactions with each other and with your external audience.

Clear and specific

If you want to be able to put your vision and values to use in these ways, it’s important that they’re clear, specific, and based on true insight into your organisation. Vague visions and values can’t inform decision-making or help anyone understand what’s expected of them.

But invest in getting your vision and values right, and they’ll be reliable tools – ones that will pay back that investment in efficient strategic decision-making and a strong employee culture.

Why strategy always comes first

Why strategy always comes first

Creativity and creative ideas don’t spring from nowhere. They need fertile soil to take root in. For us, that means research, insight, and strategy.

Strategy is always the first step in our creative process. When we start work on a brand, whether for an organisation or a campaign, we start with three questions. Who’s the audience? What does it need to communicate? And what is the context – what other brands and messages are competing for the same audience’s attention?

Those three questions guide our research, revealing insights that help us form the idea at the heart of the brand.

There’s a notion that leading with strategy makes the creative work less … creative. That the strategy constrains the creativity, turning something that should be inspired and expressive into something more like painting by numbers.

But ask anyone involved in a creative pursuit and they’ll tell you that constraints and parameters are vital for creativity. There’s nothing less inspiring than a blank canvas.

There’s nothing less inspiring than a blank canvas

Brand strategy research

And while our work is creative, inspiring and expressive, it’s also a commercial service. We commit to delivering it within a certain timeframe to help our clients achieve their goals. Starting with strategy gets us focused as early as possible on what we need to do creatively to achieve those goals.

It means we don’t waste our clients’ time waiting and hoping the muse will inspire us. It gives us a better chance of presenting something that’s right first time. And it streamlines decision-making.

Decisions about creative work can all too easily become about individual reviewers’ personal taste, which can lead to deadlock, followed by dilution of the work to try to please everyone. But when there’s a clear strategy behind the work, the discussion can focus on whether it could deliver on that strategy more powerfully, rather than on the associations it sparks in individual people.

We’re a creative bunch, and we’ve found that this way of working makes the best use of our creativity. Research and insight show us what matters; and instead of spreading ourselves thin, trying to fill an entire blank canvas, we can focus the full force of our creativity on those key elements.

Cousins, not clones

Cousins, not clones

A successful brand gives people a cohesive experience no matter which channels and touch points they use to engage with it. But that doesn’t mean the experience has to be totally uniform. There’s plenty of space to be flexible, even playful, while still maintaining cohesion.

Here’s an example: while researching issue 2 of the Brand Report, we looked at two different campaigns by the investment brand Moneyfarm. The Invest Wisely campaign uses brightly coloured backgrounds, cut-out photographic images of objects, and snappy, commanding headlines. The No More If Onlys campaign uses darker, heavier colours, photographic backgrounds, and longer headlines based on historical quotes.

The two campaigns look quite different. But Moneyfarm’s brand is no less cohesive for that.

Of course, the Moneyfarm logo appears in both campaigns, labelling them both as part of the brand. A brand is much more than just a logo, but the logo is a powerful, unmistakable sign that a given communication belongs to that brand.

And crucially, the two campaigns feel similar. Behind the distinct messages and expressions, there’s evidence of a consistent personality influencing the style of the campaigns. No More If Onlys presents predictions that haven’t aged well; Invest Wisely presents homely objects that represent time well spent; both campaigns trust their audiences to get the point without a lot of explanation, and both have a sense of playfulness and humour that helps the messages to land. The two campaigns are like cousins: they’re individual, but you can see the family resemblance.

The two campaigns are like cousins: individual, but you can see the family resemblance

Moneyfarm campaign visual
Moneyfarm campaign visual

Read between the guidelines

There’s a negative stereotype of a brand manager as someone who says no to creativity, who uses the brand as a constraint to stifle exciting ideas. But there’s a good reason the industry standard term is brand guidelines, not brand rules. Good brand guidelines simply describe ways to use colour, type, tone of voice, and specific graphic devices like the logo to signal to audiences that different communications belong to the same family. Skilled creatives can find endless fresh and exciting ways to incorporate those signals.

And it’s important to encourage this kind of creative exploration. Without it, you risk losing your audience’s attention. If each new campaign or publication seems cloned from the one before, your audiences will stop noticing them, thinking they’ve seen and engaged with them already. Regularly pushing your brand into new territory keeps engaged audiences from switching off, and provides regular opportunities to engage new audiences.

This article is from issue 2 of the Brand Report. For more insights and action points to strengthen your brand, download the complete report now.

Does insight want to be free?

Does insight want to be free?

Insight and expertise are the foundations of many brands. It’s important to convince potential customers you have them – and that means giving some away for free.

Some brands do this with a blog on their website. Others go the extra mile and create a publication, with its own brand, to house their insight content.

Some of these publications exist in print; some are published as PDFs; some as online content. Whatever form they take, creating and maintaining a publication brand takes effort. So what are the pros and cons, and when is it worthwhile to spin off your content offering into its own brand?

A separately branded publication lets you target new and different audiences

When is it worthwhile to spin off your content offering into its own brand?

The pitfalls

The big potential downside of a publication brand separate from your main brand is that it can separate your insights from your organisation itself. The point of publishing insight is to influence potential customers’ perceptions of your brand. If there’s a chance that someone who discovers and values your publication might not connect it back to its parent brand, that’s a problem.

Likewise, if insight is part of your brand promise, but potential customers who see that promise can’t find the insights you’re publishing to back it up, that’s also a problem.

So if you do choose to create a separate publication brand, it needs to be clearly related to your main brand, and the customer journey between the two brands needs to be straightforward. But why create a separate publication brand at all?

Distance and flexibility

A separate brand signals that your publication has a level of editorial freedom from your corporate brand. It suggests to the audience that the publication is not a pure sales and marketing channel in the same way as a corporate blog. If the publication has its own distinct name and look, it’s easier for audiences to accept that it exists mainly to provide them with valuable insights, not to sing the praises of a particular product.

That same editorial freedom gives you new flexibility. Maybe there are messages, insights or opinions that it’s difficult to express within the framework of your corporate brand. A publication with a bit of distance from that brand could be the way to put those messages across.

That flexibility potentially gives you more reach, and that’s the real benefit of a separately branded publication. It lets you target new and different audiences.

If your brand is struggling to appeal to younger people, for instance, a publication designed to appeal to that generation could be a strategy for engaging with them more effectively without changing your entire corporate brand.

And it’s possible that people who would never engage with your corporate brand directly – because they don’t need the services you offer, or because their values clash with yours in some way – could still find value in the content you publish. Perhaps they’ll never become customers, but they could still help you by endorsing and sharing your insights with other people who will. They’re unlikely to do that with your corporate blog, but an expert publication, related to your brand but clearly separated from it, could be another story.

Any of these approaches can work as long as it’s backed up by a strong content strategy. But if you’ve dismissed the idea of forming a publication brand in the past, it’s worth looking again at the value it could provide.

This article is from issue 2 of the Brand Report. For more insights and action points to strengthen your brand, download the complete report now.

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