When you write for a small company that wants to be a brand, it’s usually going to have a lot of ‘me-me’ language taking place. You will be trying to extol the virtues of the company to the prospective consumer. While this sounds fine for a brochure or an advertisement, it doesn’t work if you’re trying to write something that is meant to look natural and unpaid. This leads us to another way to build recall of your company/client in your customer’s mind; use other brands.
Open your eyes to the possibilities.
Image by Dboybaker under license CC-BY 2.0
Right off the bat, I’m warning you against using your competitors in your content writing. At times, brands try to portray their competition and users of their competition as people who aren’t making good decisions in the hope of making their brand look better. This works sometimes but it works a lot better if you are already an established brand. Look to the brand banter from a few years ago by Zomato and Amazon.
Zomato replied with, “You should’ve seen the ones that didn’t make the cut.”
It’s nice but it won’t work as well in a content writing space. Content writing requires a different approach, it requires subtlety while innovating. That brings us to brands for your next content writing innovation.
Brands – The companies you think are big enough to be remembered even after they’ve stopped communicating with you.
So how do you use brands in content writing?
Brands have everything to do with character and personality. That’s why you can perform a brand exercise where you swap in a different product or service but the personality remains the same. Imagine if Uber was a hospital, what would it be like? We experienced questions like this in our first Masterclass, you can read about all the highlights of that event here.
It was called Branding For Startups.
The point here is that a brand is almost like a person. It’s an entity. It has its own dreams, its own style and it’s own personality attributes. Here’s an example of using brands in content writing to create a character and set a scene:
The conference room at Flicandar Ventures was filled with middle-aged men in black Louis Phillipe trousers and grey Raymonds blazers. They were waiting for the owner to step in and announce his retirement as CEO of the company. Each one had a silk tie tied up extra neatly today. Each one wanted to look their best if they were to become the one who controlled the direction of the company from now on. When the owner walked in, he was accompanied by someone young. Though they were indoors, the young man wore sunglasses. He also wore a dark blue, wrinkled Quiksilver t-shirt. On the t-shirt was an illustration of a shark jumping out of the water near a beach. Though everyone, including the owner, was dressed in trousers, this boy wore Billabong shorts that ended at his knees. On those shorts, light blue waves and blue flowers on a white background could be seen clearly. His shoes had thick black laces and thick white soles. Looking closely at his shoes, the letters ‘DC’ could be seen. When both of them entered the conference room, the men who were seated each had a pen in their hand. However, after the CEO uttered a single sentence, all of them dropped it simultaneously on the conference room table. He said, “Meet the man who will replace all of you.” Luckily, the pens they dropped did not leave a mark on the Steelcase table, it was designed with situations like this in mind. The boy turned to the CEO, then to the men who were seated and said, “I’ll be making a few changes.” Then he sat down and said, “Don’t worry. Everything isn’t going to change; I’m keeping the table.”
Can you guess what was the product in that situation? In case you didn’t, the brand was Steelcase and they make office furniture. This piece was conceptualised with Steelcase being the brand in mind and the concept/brief behind the piece being that Steelcase products appeal to multiple age groups because their products are timeless.
Not a Steelcase table but a nice one to imagine for your work.
Image by Steven Depolo under license CC-BY 2.0
Content writing is a tricky game. Most of the time, you get a brief regarding the purpose of your content writing along with the audience you’re writing for. There isn’t a lot of leeway in those cases. However, if your client approaches you for content writing and doesn’t have any idea about what kind of content they want to produce for their audience, this can be an idea you pitch.
Try it, even if a brand manager doesn’t agree with this idea, you can use it as an exercise to improve your content writing skills. If your storytelling skills are strong enough, brands will want to associate themselves with you. Let’s give you one case study where this happened albeit slightly differently.
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