Increasing Your Brand’s Resilience

NEW YEAR, NEW BRAND: PART 3

All right, so let’s say your company has a consistent and unique brand voice. Great!

And your team excels at blending storytelling with instructional design to produce memorable content. Fabulous!

As a result, business is booming. Your brand is recognizable and loved. Perfect!

Then all of a sudden – uh oh.

Your organization is being called everything from “insensitive” to one of the -ISTs (racist, sexist, ableist, ageist, and so on). You’re getting canceled.

What happened?

Blind Spots in Your Content Strategy

Haphazardly creating content without considering the sensitive issues that intersect with your business creates a minefield of blind spots. These blind spots, when noticed, can cause “bad optics” (or bad press), which can undermine the trustworthiness of your brand.

If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that life is not business-as-usual. From #MeToo to Black Lives Matter to COVID-19, social, political, and ethical issues dominate. More people are paying attention to what businesses say and how they say it.

Even staying silent on an issue that affects your customers or employees is seen as taking a stance.

According to a recent study by Sprout Social, 66% of consumers think it’s important for brands to speak out on important issues. “Brands face more reward than risk. Consumers’ most common emotional reactions to brands taking a stand on social were positive.”
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This means that whatever you do – do it intentionally. 

How to Eliminate Blind Spots

1. Get Curious & Educate Yourself

The first step to eliminating blind spots is to find out what you don’t know. No one is an expert on everything, and all of us have some degree of unconscious biases.

• Listen, read, and observe with an open curiosity to opinions that differ from your own. Try not to get defensive.

• Understand what counts as a reliable source and be open to changing your opinion in the face of new evidence.

• Ask questions, but understand that people are not required to teach you about the prejudices they face. Work to educate yourself.

2. Decide What Works Best for Your Brand & Update Your Style Guide

As mentioned earlier, whatever you choose to do with your content, do it intentionally.

After educating yourself on a topic, consider your brand’s mission and core values. How do they align with the issues? Do any controversial topics affect your teams, vendor partners, or customers?
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Decide when and how your brand will address the issues – or not. (Remember, silence must also be intentional!)

Communicate these decisions to your team by incorporating them into your brand’s style guide and updating them regularly as the world changes around you.

What to Include in Your Brand Style Guide:

• The topics on which your brand will take a stance and how they align with core values

• The issues on which you will NOT take a stance and why

• What level of conscious language should be used

  • Resource: Conscious Style Guide

  • Resource: Patient-First Language

3. Elicit & Respond to Feedback

Having tunnel vision and focusing narrowly on a particular target audience can also open your content to causing unintentional offense. Therefore, it’s important to elicit feedback throughout your content creation cycle and respond accordingly.

Encourage Diverse Feedback: Before you hit publish or release a video, enlist the opinions of a diverse audience, not just your target customer. This will help identify any unintentional meanings to your messaging.

• Practice Empathy and Be Open to Changing: Inevitably, someone is going to disagree with you or get offended. When this happens, instead of reacting with defensiveness or not reacting at all, respond with empathy. Empathy allows you the emotional space to decide if their critique is valid, and if you need to make a change.

• Respond and Update Guidelines as Needed: Getting feedback provides an opportunity to clarify your intent and messaging. Sometimes the feedback will spark a change in your guidelines or processes; sometimes, it won’t. Either way, explaining why you do what you do (or don’t do) tells the audience that you heard them, and they matter. And as we all know, everyone wants to feel heard.

Bottom Line: Whatever You Do – Do It Intentionally

If there’s one thing to remember it’s that your content must always be intentional. 

You can absolutely choose to be controversial, stay silent, or take on a mainstream point of view. After all, you can’t please everyone 100% of the time. Criticism is a part of life.

The point is that your brand will be more resilient if you can see the criticism coming and be confident in how you’ll respond to it.
 

Up Next:

In the next and final installment of the New Year, New Brand series, you’ll learn how to take everything you’ve learned so far and execute on it by leveraging creative partnerships.

In the meantime, if you have questions or would like help developing your content strategy or recovering from a content misstep, contact us.