How Can An External Creative Capture Your Company's Unique Voice?

The Curious Case for Continuity and Change

Leveraging external creatives for communications can infuse fresh perspectives, tailor messages across various mediums, and ensure your brand remains dynamically engaged with its audience. External creatives bring experience of the evolving marketplace outside the brand’s corporate environment. Consider collaborating with an external creative to help boost your brand's narrative and connect more deeply with your audiences. Here’s why:

The Dilemma of Outsourcing Brand Voice

In corporate communications, a company's voice is its identity — it conveys its values, beliefs and personality. So, there’s a degree of knee-wobbling when it comes to entrusting this voice to external teams.

The scepticism often stems from the fear that an outside creative may dilute the brand's essence, misinterpret its core message, or fail to capture the nuanced understanding that internal teams possess in spades. Senior marketers and communication executives might worry that external partners could homogenise their distinct voice, losing the authenticity that connects with their audience.

Fair enough, but, this trepidation overlooks some crucial advantages:

The Power of Perspective

External creatives can reflect the brand back to itself, warts and all, often revealing truths those within the organisation might be too close (or too busy burping the company Kool-Aid) to see. Externals bring diverse experiences and expertise that can challenge generic groupthink and push beyond the brand's comfort zone, driving innovation opportunities and keeping communication strategies fresh and relevant.

The Strategic Edge of Externals

The value of an outsider's viewpoint can be in seeing the brand through the eyes of the customer, the competitor and even the industry at large.

This multifaceted insight can realign the brand voice with the company's internal vision of itself but also help bring it in line with what might have changed in their external marketplace.

Moreover, an external team’s broad exposure to various industries and audiences can help them position and promote new, nuanced brand messaging with clear-eyed creative content delivered to a wider spectrum of internal and external recipients and respondents.

Identifying Hidden Gems Through Fresh Eyes

External creatives can catalyse rediscovery within a company.

These fresh eyes come without preconceived notions or internal biases, allowing them to question the status quo and see unique selling points that internal teams, operating in a state of familiarity-induced near-sightedness, might overlook.

External communicators, being less immersed in the company's day-to-day operations, can often more objectively evaluate the brand’s assets and messages. They can sometimes better identify and articulate distinctive elements of a brand's offering that could be easily leveraged to differentiate it in the market.

Just as internal diversity is critical to regenerating ever-evolving business growth, this other outsider perspective is vital in a landscape where different brands may compete on the same platforms with similar products. Outsiders can help catalyse messaging that pivots from meh to memorable.

Deep-Dive Immersion into the Brand's World

External creatives must become enthusiastic brand students to embody a company's voice. This immersion is a meticulous process that includes recognising the reality of the brand's culture, ethos and customer dialogue to date. They need to absorb the language, aspirations, values and quirks that make what’s best about the brand uniquely meaningful to its audience. This requires more than skimming the company website; it demands in-depth diligent exploration and genuine curiosity.

Workshops and Interviews: The Art of Alignment

Central to this deep dive are workshops and interviews with a wide range of internal stakeholders. Not just the top-level executives but employees across departments and functions.

Such workshops serve as platforms for storytelling, where the brand's triumphs and challenges are shared. Interactive sessions can help reveal the unwritten codes of the brand — the internal lingo, the customer success stories, pet peeves, the shared triumphs and the common pain points. This is golden grist to the creative mill.

Familiarity Breeds Contentment

Interviews can also provide narrative nuances. Open conversations with outsiders can help reveal and capture the living, breathing essence of the brand from those who live it daily. Here, the external creative listens, learns, and moves beyond the carefully curated first impression and internalises the brand's true character.

Together, all these methodologies enable external creatives to refine and reflect the brand's authentic voice, ensuring any communication resonates with the company's core identity while matching the expectations and desires of its audience.

Synergising Knowledge and Creativity

The alchemy of collaboration between internal and external talent lies in blending the deep institutional knowledge of the former with the innovative (and sometimes irreverent) perspectives of the latter. It's about creating a fusion of fresh insights that respects the brand's heritage while pushing the boundaries of what's possible — or more plausible.

Strategies for Seamless Integration

Joint Discovery Workshops: Initiating projects with collaborative workshops helps align objectives, share knowledge, and set the stage for open communication

Regular Touchpoints: Establishing routine meetings ensures ongoing dialogue, allowing both teams to stay attuned to each other's thoughts and progress

Shared Platforms: Collaborative tools and platforms enable a transparent workflow and collective resource pool, encouraging real-time input and adjustments

Feedback Loops: Structured feedback mechanisms help refine ideas, ensuring external innovations resonate internally and meet brand expectations

Rigorous Reviews: Testing concepts in safe environments can help reduce risk, alleviate anxiety and align outputs with brand values

Existential Flexibility

Try an external creative if you’re looking for an agile approach that’s unencumbered by the fetters of over-familiarity.