When you work with a creative agency to develop your brand style guidelines, you may be expecting them to create your visual branding components like your logo and brand colors. But what is often overlooked in brand guidelines are elements like tone of voice and messaging. Brand statements, however, are crucial to developing a well-rounded brand and allowing you to create compelling and consistent materials that will help attract your target audience.
Multiple different brand statements work together to create your brand’s “vocal” identity and brand messaging. Each serves an important purpose that helps define who you are as a brand and an apartment community. Learn more about each brand statement and why you need them in your community’s toolkit.
Purpose Statement
To create your brand purpose statement, you have to find your “why” and identify why it is you do what you do. Your purpose should be greater than the obvious motivators like providing housing or making money. Instead, you should look to your greater purpose that is rooted in your beliefs and morals.
A great way to identify your purpose statement is to think about your community’s founding story. Was your community created to offer a unique living experience for residents? Was it created to fill a hole in your area’s housing market? Narrowing in on the answers to these questions can help you synthesize the “why” behind your community’s purpose.
Vision Statement
In a nutshell, your vision statement is the goal you are working towards. While your purpose statement explains your “why,” or your motivation, your vision statement summarizes your ultimate goal. Your vision statement should sum up your desired community impact.
These high-level statements are often lofty and bold, and they speak to how the future you envision not only for your community but also for the world. It also should speak to the future you want to achieve over the lifespan of owning and managing your assets.
Mission Statement
Unlike purpose and vision statements, mission statements are focused on your actions. They focus on the more immediate future, and the daily actions you can take to help you work towards your loftier goals.
Mission statements usually follow a loose format, which includes explaining your business and tying it directly to your company values. It should also focus on how you serve your prospective residents. When crafting your mission statement, be sure to hit on these three key components: purpose, values, and goals.
Brand Positioning Statement
Brand positioning statements help you craft customer communications. Once you have your vision, mission, and value propositions, you can blend them together to create your positioning statement.
This statement should identify what your company does, the target audience, and your key differentiators. They often follow a similar structure:
(Company Name) is a (industry definition) for (target audience) that (unique value proposition).
Following this general format will help you create the first draft of your positioning statement that you can tweak and refine until it feels true to your community.
Brand Attributes
Once you’ve nailed down your vision, mission, and positioning statement, it’s time to give your brand a defined personality. Defining your brand attributes will help you start to define your brand’s tone and style, which allows your audience to get a better feel for your community.
Brand attributes are words that describe your brand’s personality. They’re also typically paired with a short phrase or sentence to give added context and clarity. A few common brand attributes include:
- Friendly
- Authoritative
- Witty
- Bold
- Energetic
- Laid-back
- Sophisticated
- Trustworthy
- Aspirational
Consider choosing between three and five attributes that you feel best represent your brand and stick with them to create a consistent style.
Value Propositions
Your community’s value propositions are what make them different from your competitors—they clearly define why a prospective resident would want to choose your community over another. Crafting value propositions is pivotal to creating strong marketing materials; they allow you to clearly articulate what makes your community one-of-a-kind, and in turn, help convert prospects into residents.
Brand Identity Statement
Your brand identity statement is often a short, two or three paragraphs that describes your brand voice, tone, and style. This helps you expand upon your brand attributes and personify your brand even further. For example, your brand may sound like a friend spending their free time hanging with the resident. It could also be a sophisticated, elevated tone that alludes to a luxury lifestyle. Deciding on your overarching identity is pivotal to bringing your brand to life in a more practical way.
Each of these brand statements works together to tell the whole story of your apartment community or property management company. Individually, they don’t tell the entire story—but when you use them all together, it helps you define who you are and create a consistent message across all of your marketing materials. Brand development plays a crucial role in setting you apart from your competitors and fostering easy brand recognition, which in turn results in a strong, stable community!
If you need help crafting your brand statements, enlisting the help of a seasoned agency like zipcode creative can help you build the strong foundation you need. Reach out to our team today to get started!