On the 21st of april, 2022, the MOA SMART Congres stook place in the Amsterdam Art Center. Our consultant Margot Jegerings was there as one of the speakers to talk about the importance of a strong verbal brand identity. In this article you will find a short summary of her presentation.
Verbal branding
How often do you find yourself carefully weighing your words, because you know one word is more suitable for what you mean or one resonates better with the audience. Your choice of words can largely affect the result of your message. That is verbal branding: everything you communicate with words surrounding your brand. In other words, creating brand differentiation through language. You can also call that brand language, and it’s a fundamental part of your identity and essential for brand interaction. The more specific your choice of words, the more clearly an image can be formed by your target audience.
Verbal brand identity
When you have a strong vision, the art is to convey this vision with your brand. Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle is a framework that explains that a vision revolves around the ‘why’ behind what we do and what problem we want to solve. It is then a question of how we can achieve this in an effective way and what activities are involved. Developing a verbal brand identity unfortunately takes more than this. When creating this identity you also need to know who you are as a brand. What do you stand for and how do you behave? Only when you figure these things out you can get to the core of your brand. The brand identity enables you to communicate with the outside world. Developing an identity and name is all about making choices. Because if you want to be everything, for everyone, you are ultimately nothing to nobody.
Naming
Making choices is of importance in name creation. It is only possible to incorporate 1, 2 or a maximum of 3 elements of your brand when creating a name. This is when we talk about name positioning. These are elements that remain very close to your brand identity. Your name is often the first touchpoint between a brand and the target audience. This is why naming forms an extremely important part of your brand identity and image. It is a point of differentiation, it helps you position yourself in the market, gives strength to the brand, enables you to communicate more than just what you see, and above all makes something nameable.
Case
We concluded the presentation on Thursday with a case for which the attendees got to work with naming themselves. They were asked the same question we once received by Vogelaar Vredehof. “Develop a name for this ‘juicy, sweet, crunchy and slightly acidic apple that has a bite to it’, which would be suitable for the shelves of a large supermarket chain (Albert Heijn, but we didn’t tell them that), and is grown in the Netherlands for all Dutch people.’’ The groups came up with names and slogans for the apple, by successively associating, creating and selecting.
Find out more about the apple of The Netherlands which we named ‘Sprank’: https://www.globrands.com/projects/sprank/