How To Create An Endless Stream of Social Content
In yesterday’s article about how to communicate with Gen Z, I talked about making sure your brand and product architecture lineup with a purpose you believe in such as being a vegan free or all botanical brand.
I received quite a bit of inquiry as to what a brand’s architecture and their product architecture are and what they look like so I thought I’d break it down for you.
When I take clients through my 3 Pillar Dream Axiom Branding Process one of the sections we help artisans hash out is their brand and product architecture. Both forms of architecture play an important role in developing the foundations that you’ll use to communicate with your audience from and they allow you to always have a ton of ideas to create social content with.
The following sections of the architecture are
Purpose (why it exist)
Promise (what does it deliver)
Personality (who is it for)
Identity (what does it look like)
Since developing a brand architecture is pretty self-explanatory today we’ll focus on each of the four sections as they relate to your products and how to use them to develop the product architecture for your brand.
Purpose (why it exist)
The easiest of the sections is the Purpose and it literally is just that-your products purpose ie: why the product exists or how it benefits the consumer.
For instance, let’s say you’re a cosmetics brand that sells an all-natural beauty line and you want to introduce your new beeswax-based lip balm to your customers when you fill out the purpose section you would say something like this:
The purpose of our beeswax-based lip balm is to provide our customers with an all natural lip balm made of the highest quality ingredients that moisten the lips and prevents cracking and tears in the dry weather.
Easy enough right?
If you have multiple products you’ll go through every product within your catalog and fill out the what the purpose is for each one, once you’re finished you move on to the next section which is the promise.
Promise (what does it deliver)
The intent of developing a promise for each of your products is to have strong enough language to communicate with throughout your content that will influence your target market to buy into your brand, you can also use your product promise as the hook in your advertising campaign.
Using the lip balm as an example we could develop a product promise such as,
“All beeswax used in the lip balm is obtained from a small group of fair-trade farmers that we have personal relationships with to ensure that all wax is ethically harvested and no bees are harmed in the process.”
That’s a powerful promise for an all natural beauty brand, especially considering that you already may have some customer overlap between people that use all natural products because they believe they’re safer for you and people that choose to use all natural products because they don’t believe in animal testing and/or unethical harvesting practices of animal materials.
Personality (who is it for)
Wait, products have a personality?
Well, yes and no.
While your product doesn’t necessarily have a personality, the person you’re wanting to communicate the product to does and since people are most drawn to people that are like them your product should mirror that person’s personality.
Let me break it down for you…
We have a lip balm and we know what the purpose of the product is, but people buy products for different reasons.
Person A might buy the lip balm because they’re a runner and their lips always get chapped when they go for their daily jog while Person B might buy the lip balm because they’ll be damned if they're caught in a makeout worthy moment with lips that look like sidewalk chalk.
So in this section, you’ll develop the personality for the ideal consumer of this product which will also serve as the personality for the product.
For instance, I like a good make-out sesh so we’ll use Person B as your example
Personality- The beeswax lip balm is made for the young woman on the go who lives a life of passion, romance, and excitement; always prepared for life’s little surprises and always ready to greet the world, or their new beau, with a heartfelt kiss.
See how easy that was?
Two key things to keep in mind when developing your product personality is the existing customers you already have and your brand’s personality, when developing your product’s personality be sure you don’t venture too far from either or you’ll run the risk of turning off customers you already have or losing fluidity with your brand altogether.
Identity (how it looks)
The final section is pretty straightforward just like the first one, but it’s intended to make you go farther than just what the product literally looks like and develop sensory models for it so when you’re creating content to promote it you’ve got a clear blueprint to build from.
With that said, these are the following sensory models I help my clients identify for each of their products.
Visual
- Is the product cylindrical, a sphere shape, square?
- What does the font look like?
- What are the exact colors used for the product and the corresponding color codes that go with them?
Auditory
- What type of music would fit with the product’s personality?
- What does the customer this is made for currently listening to?
Texture
- What is the current texture of the product?
- What is the current texture of the packaging?
Olfactory
- What does the product smell like?
Note: while we haven’t developed the tech to transfer smell through our phones yet, you can use representations of the smells to communicate like photographing the aromatic ingredients in the product and coupling them with scent descriptive copy.
Do you see how each of these sensory models can be used to effectively communicate your product to your ideal audience in order to influence them to take action and make a purchase?
If you have a lot of products in your catalog this can take quite some time to go through, but I promise you it’s worth it. If you haven’t done this yet, take a day out to develop the architecture for all of your products and see how easy it is to consistently develop pieces of content to communicate with afterward.
