What I Do As A Brand Communication Consultant

Watch/listen to the related video

I guess you can tell from the title Brand Communication Consultant that what I do has to do with brands, it has to do with communication and has to do with consulting.

I certainly do consult with businesses, both large and small or other types of organisations like NGOs or nonprofits and I even consult with individuals.

For each of them, there's something about their brand that they want to communicate, there are certain people that they want to communicate these things to and there are of course, certain things that they want to receive back; they want to receive feedback.

I’d divide my work as a Brand Communication Consultant into three categories of activities, all mainly done behind the scenes:

1. Research

2. Strategy and planning

3. Execution

For one of the rare times you'll see me in front of the camera on a client's behalf check out this video.

Research

A major part of what I do is trying to find out more about my clients, and also trying to find out more about all these stakeholders, all these different people or groups of people with whom my clients want to communicate. That entails a lot of research.

Now that research could be interviews or meetings with my clients. It could be looking over their communications plans or strategies if they have existing communications plans or strategies. It could be looking at some aspects of their overall business strategy.

It could be reviewing old reports or new reports. It could be desk research into the competitors to see how they are communicating with their clients or customers.

This research category actually is quite intense. Remember, I'm not inside of the organisation and I'm not with them every day. So it's my job to find out as much as I possibly can about the people, the business, the organisation and the people that they serve so that I can communicate on their behalf as genuinely as possible.

Speaking of plans and reviewing plans, this brings me to the second category of activity that I do as a Brand Communication Consultant.

Strategy and Planning

Sometimes it's my job to create plans or to develop a strategy. I can spend quite a bit of time after doing the research thinking about the broad communication goals.

What is the communication problem that this organisation needs to solve? Or what are the communications challenges or what are those things that they need to lean into more? Who are those new audiences that they need to reach or those new people that they would like to hear from?

I cannot do this in a vacuum, that’s why the research category is very important for this. I'm keeping contact on an ongoing basis with my clients to ask new questions, to clarify new things that may come to me or even talking to different people in the organisation or to clients.

Clearly, the research actually keeps going on as I’m developing the strategy and doing the planning.

Execution

The third category of activities that I do as a brand communication consultant is execute; execution. And for me, a lot of this starts with the written word.

I do a tonne of writing and I would say to anyone who wants to do something like this, “Love writing, love learning more about writing, love how to become more effective at writing for different topics for different interests and for different industries. It will really serve you well.

Writing is one of the main things that I do during the day as a Brand Communication Consultant, and that could be writing for several different things. It could be writing for the media, like news releases, whether they're for traditional media or online media. It could be writing blog posts or articles.

It could be reports, depending on who the client is or what a project is. It could be social media, captions or writing a series of these social media captions. It could be writing host or moderator notes for a a show that has been conceptualised for the client or that I'm executing on behalf of a client. So writing is a pretty big part of what I do execution wise.

But then that obviously leads to some visual communication elements like video and photographs. That means that I work with videographers, photographers and graphic designers, for example, to turn the written concepts into different visual products. And to get some of these communications materials out to the world I also work with social media managers.

This is an important and dynamic part of my job that I really, really enjoy. I love to write and I love working with other creative people to bring something to life. Whether that something will end up on a tangible page or on a digital screen, whatever.

What does your work look like? I’d love to hear more about what you do. Share your work story with pride in the comments.