What is a brand communications campaign?

A brand campaign is different from a product-based advertising campaign.

Where most advertising campaigns seek to increase sales directly, by promoting a particular product or service, a brand campaign builds your brand by telling its story.

Its objectives are to increase understanding and awareness of your brand positioning among your target audience. A good brand campaign will deliver loyalty and affection for your brand, which will give it a big competitive advantage.

Why a brand campaign is vital for your business

As well as giving your business a strong competitive advantage by creating loyalty among your target audience, a good brand campaign will make your product-based ad campaigns much more effective.

That’s because a strong brand gives your other ad campaigns permission to speak to your target audiences.

Imagine walking into a pub, and heading over to a group of people who you’ve never met, and barging into their conversation. Chances are that you’d be told, very firmly, to leave them alone.

But if they already knew and liked you, then your arrival would be welcomed, and they’d all be interested to hear from you.

That’s the difference between launching a product ad campaign when nobody knows what you stand for, and launching the same campaign when people are aware of who you are and what you stand for. So it’s essential that you deliver a brand campaign before you invest in product-specific advertising.

How to write the brand campaign brief

First, make sure that you have completed your brand strategy, and have a strong brand proposition. (There are guides to show you how to do this in our ‘guides’ section.) Your creative agency will need to know what your proposition is before they can craft an effective campaign.

Next, write the brief that you will give to your creative agency.

Your brief will be easy to write if you’ve already written your brand strategy, because your brand strategy will contain almost everything that you should include in the brief.

Start with the background: explain what your company sells, its history and its brand positioning. List the competitors and their positionings, and state what makes you different.

Next, state your target audience.

Then, list your objectives. These should be measurable. They might include quantitative measures such as increased awareness and consideration, and qualitative measures like spontaneous recall of the brand positioning and its values.

Then, state the main messages that you want to get across.

For example, your brand research might have identified that people think that your brand is old-fashioned and unethically manufactured. But your brand strategy has shown that you can credibly claim to be entirely ethical and up-to-date. So your main message would be to emphasise these qualities, and the reasons why people should believe them.

It’s important to keep these messages as simple and as focussed as possible. Less is more here. A laser-like focus on one or two messages is much more likely to result in an effective campaign than a long list of messages.

Next, state your tone of voice. You’ll find this in your brand strategy.

Finally, state your budget. Your media buyers will need to know how much you plan to invest, so that they can recommend the right mix of channels.

Brief your agency

Take your brief to your advertising agency and talk it through with them. 

Assess the agency’s proposals

Once the agency has produced some ideas for a campaign, you’ll need to decide whether they are any good.

Take a step back. If you didn’t know anything about the brand, would the story that the proposed campaign tells make you think favourably about it? Would you understand the story? Would it make you feel that you were part of a tribe whose values the brand shared? Crucially, is it believable?

Choose the channels: how the campaign should be delivered

Your campaign should make people think differently about your brand. To be effective, it should use a range of channels. A few social media posts and a short press campaign probably won’t achieve that.

So check which channels your agency is proposing to use, and why.

They’ll probably propose an advertising campaign. How will they back that campaign up, so that people see the messages in several different ways? Will they, for example, develop a compelling story that can get into the press with a strong PR campaign? How will this be backed up with social media? Are they planning to sponsor any suitable events? Have they identified any suitable sponsorship opportunities?

Measuring the effectiveness of the campaign

A standard ad campaign can be measured by the increase in sales. A brand campaign is designed to change attitudes, and although this is essential for the company’s success, it’s harder to prove the connection between the change in attitude and increased sales later.

Instead, you should use your regular brand research to monitor the changes to brand perception that your campaign will deliver. These changes are every bit as important as the sales increases that a product ad campaign will deliver, because they make those sales increases sustainable and likely to last longer. That’s because a strong brand delivers loyalty, so people are more likely to make repeat purchases.

Why this is a communications campaign and not an advertising campaign

A brand campaign is bigger than an advertising campaign. Ad campaigns tend to be restricted to media that can deliver a direct response: direct mail, TV, press and so on.

But brand messages should appear wherever there is an appropriate opportunity to get the right messages in front of your target audience. These opportunities might include charity sponsorship, PR, events sponsorship, comments on social media conversations about causes that your brand should care about, and so on.

So it’s important to make sure that your agency think more broadly about the channels that your brand campaign will use, and that they don’t simply reach for TV, press, outdoor and social media.

Finally, check that everything reinforces the campaign

Before you launch the campaign, you should make sure that everything you do is consistent with the campaign’s messages. This should include your website, your processes, your social media, your product packaging and so on.

The best way to make sure that your brand is consistent is to conduct a customer journey audit. There’s a guide to explain how to do this in our ‘how-to guides’ section.

If you would like some help with developing some of the elements that underpin a great brand communications campaign, like a strong brand strategy and great brand research, we’d be happy to help. Please get in touch here.