Brand content planning (full exercise)

0:00 I do an exercise in inperson workshops with Brands small and large it's called a brand narrative exercise this video I'm going to walk through the complete process I used to run this all the different stages of the exercise and a bunch of real life examples good brands now who create compelling content often view their content in their world like a TV show plots sets characters and even if you don't think your brand is set up to be structured like that almost all are and in this exercise we actually hash through that we identify all those different plot points you can use to form your brand narrative and then we make a Content plan from there of how that actually feeds into the marketing that you create and today we're going to go through that whole thing we'll go through stage byst stage then I'll break down examples in fashion from represent and in consumer package goods from poppy if you ever really want to understand how a brand narrative and a brand story

0:46 shapes and how you can do that in a really modern way this is the video for you so why would you want to treat your brand like a TV show how does that even make sense why is your brand even need a narrative to start short form media short form video Instagram Tik Tok YouTube they dominate the way consumers create content they also dominate as the places where we advertise Our Brands for online sales or for online awareness for retail sales whether we're doing that directly through our organic media whether we're using influencers whether we're running it as advertisements that's where media consumption lives and people treat engagement with this content the way we used to treat traditional entertainment watching TV the way you go on and see sitcoms or watch sports people now scroll their feeds or they do both at once there's a new generation of entertainment in the same formats that we saw on traditional

1:32 television that's taking over feeds as well so one of my favorite examples there two and a few of these are from the same production company um gymnasium is is boy room or boy room so this has a comedian where it actually goes to basically insane houses that single dudes have in you know uh Philadelphia or New York and you get these tours of these kind of basically a look into a wild world someone might have and they're presented in a short episodic format that's not unlike what you would see on TV but instead it's built for Tik Tok and Instagram like almost everyone has seen Kareem's amazing show um as many of you guys may have known for a campaign for a different brand Kareem and I had had some uh fake beef earlier this year but we had some fun with it super interesting guy with an interesting way of doing things on the internet and he has this amazing Subway takes show where he basically gets quick informational stuff on the subway and

2:19 everyone gives a take it's an episodic series you can go scroll through a 100 of them or one comes across your feed you know exactly what you're looking at but it's not just interview style formats as well Liam run into this Bodega get me toilet paper you and P so for instance Bodega run and I think all three of these are by that same gymnasium production company they're basically timing people going into a store to be able to get a certain number of things and find it in a certain amount of time without the bodega owners necessarily knowing and they're just kind of creating a more fun visceral entertainment series I encourage all creators in an excellent strategy but that's entertainment companies treating short form as entertainment what about Brands so this concept I think the first time I made this video January 2023 this is something I've been harping on for a minute I've actually seen a lot of brands do and a lot of Brands reach out that this video was impactful in how they've looked at their content is brand

3:05 should be doing the same exact thing because now we're at the time where people consume value content and entertainment content side by side it's not like I just watch TV and I only watch sitcoms and dramas and sports on TV and then when I want to learn something I go read books right which is a very generalized way of what is looked like 10 years ago but now someone might consume a piece of my content about marketing right next to Bodega run and that's just part of their day right they're consuming multiple things at a time right next to a promo piece from a brand all this is in one feed and so you are competing against that and so I did this video and then a series of of ones that came after about thinking of your brand story as a TV show and actually setting up like this and got an amazing response for it and now 18 months later it's a concept that's that's everywhere I'm not saying I created the concept necessarily but definitely was one of the first people really pushing it out there like that and have been stoked at

3:52 how many Brands responded to that and have built with that in mind and I've talked in similar ways about how creators and Brands can look at making sets Etc but the reason you dive into these existing plot devices is because they work because people are used to them because if entertainment has used them for so long there's probably something in human psychology that gets you to actually resonate with it so let's look at brands that are actually doing this an interesting way so midday squares is an amazing one and one of the founders guessed it on Cut 30 a few weeks ago and really a really interesting breakdown of when they wanted to actually start on their brand there this had this idea that from the start they want to in their identity have this kind of reality show and they said that they came up with they used a really interesting idea where they came up with with basically three spirit animals for their brand and how they were going to make their content and I think the first was um one was Shark

4:37 Tank it's like Shark Tank the Kardashians and Elon Musk or something similar an apologies to their team if I butchered that but they basically from the beginning were like we want this combination of you know business content with a dramatic feel like are they going to make it and they're pitching along with this like overall celebrity feel almost documented as reality TV and you can see that in their content they've built these personalities around the different people in the brand every that you see in one of these content pieces is like kind of dramatic but in a really interesting way where they're talking through how they built a chocolate factory or some big thing that came up for their brand or walking through their story and they've definitely embraced this kind of approach by a very different lens we have Alexis patar so and this is a brand that's been around for a minute and changed their content strategy and shifted it to these vignettes so they basically came up with a number of not real characters they presented a fictional world with hazel

5:24 formerly Jules a bunch of these other folks basically like stylists and characters and Personalities in New York they set them in certain stages and had drama come up between the characters when they showed up at parties and attempted murder like they have basically created this little vignette Series where they all get you know they all get a bunch of views they're able to go back and forth and like have this interplay between characters there's drama and people really got into this world they created because it's a world where it's very natural for them to wear the jewelry of the brand and people really wanted to follow this like fun little scripted series and got in touch with the characters and they consume it in little 30 to 90 second vignettes and those are two far-reaching approaches is right you can approach the brand documenting it completely like a reality show creating a fictional show and then there's just kind of like a more normal approach to it which is what I'll talk about when I actually give my examples of a represent or or poppy let's kick

6:10 into the exercise so this is the Brand Story when I do this in person we sit down and we Workshop this out in a whiteboard and we start with the plot what is happening with our brand so if you're a new brand or an old brand what would actually be going on so the plot for instance you have events underneath plots so that is are we launching a product that's an event are we going to a trade show that's an event do we have like a yearly offsite that's an event are we doing a big influencer house or meet up that can be an event you list all those out you end up having kind of quite a lot of them and you can decide basically with a little check mark is this event worthy of content or is it not you want a big old list on one side then you have devices so plot devices are things like is there drama involved with this is there something that we want to be able to come up with to lead into it is there a narrative connection between these two things do we have kind

6:56 of fiction or do we have recurring ideas or items they almost feel like events we want to make sure hey every month we do something like this like it's basically where you get to get creative underneath events and then how you're able to kind of connect those together with the emotions of an existing like you would see in television or in movie where it's a cliffhanger something like that like how do you begin to build into the plot how those devices you how those events actually connect and then we have sets where do we film where do we make content what do we have say we have an office space and a factory space and midday square is just great there you'll see like the Chocolate Factory where they make it you'll see the office where they do their things we're doing some demos and things in Costco where Costco basically became a set piece for them and there's oneoff sets okay are we doing a thing are we going to a trade show are we at a hotel does this influencer have a house whatever it is what are oneoff places that we might shoot and characters and characters was where it gets interesting so we'll start

7:43 with the team who on the actual team of the brand makes content if you're the founder are you making content is your designer making content are there other people in the company that make content this is interesting the something when I was working at jail Blaser there was like the head of sales is a very active LinkedIn presence his LinkedIn is part of the overall content strategy from a like in a significant way and he wasn't like if you had said and sat down you know okay well we have the CEO he's involved in content um we have a social media Creator she's involved in content we have other kind of social media team members they're involved a bit but then you have someone who actually makes content professionally as part of you know similar way like I do around marketing content and you're like okay we actually want to integrate that in the story and his content was a very big piece of that for certain networks and you actually make the list of team members you want to create content that can create content and in bigger companies this becomes interesting Workshop like who actually wants to and who do we want to and do they fit the

8:28 brand who else is there but having that combo and getting it out there and knowing what tools you have is important to be able to structure that narrative and then we have Community are our people making content do our customers make content how can we involve them in the plot and the devices I'll talk about represent a little bit later they're a great example of the community because people are going on these run clubs and events with them that they host and are actively creating content to participate in that and they also engage with George who the CEO a lot and like comment to him and and there's people who kind of join in that conversation in a really interesting way and then we have your kind of traditional devices so allies I look at this as like other companies you work with or collaborate with that's an an ally other influencers that you either pay or work with or represent your product whatever it is those are also allies they're people that aren't really in your company but they're in this big list of people that you can work with to help gain benefit and who

9:13 are generally on your side in how they present things then you have opponents and the opponent idea is really important because every brand is kind of taking a stand for something and it can be a conceptual opponent or a literal opponent so if you're Pepsi and Coke or Poppy and alipop or all four of those together there's kind of like a bit of a bit of that enemy naturally and all that right one big soda company versus the other big soda company whether it's mentioned directly or whether it's not or this idea of the smaller soda companies okay there's two of them but then there's also them positioning themselves against big soda big soda is really the enemy the Prebiotic sodas May compete against each other but really they're taking market share and saying we are better than the Pepsis and cokes of the world and that's how we want to present this and so they have this big conceptual enemy and a lot of Brands will have that they'll have some incumbent they're going against or some new companies they're trying to kind of shut down that maybe they don't make content directly saying it but there's

9:59 this idea aide that if we kind of create plot devices around how we want to position ourselves against this traditional concept of drama that is the line of every TV show it's interesting and then conceptually it can be the same way if a software brand is fighting the idea of being unorganized right like that can be a conceptual enemy so how this Exercise Works is we just roll through the list big whiteboard we start to go through the events and the devices the sets the characters and if if someone can't think of events another thing we do is we actually go down the list of like when were you founded what did you launch what did you put together what trade shows you attended what were big moments in company history what changed the trajectory of what you've worked on so far and if you haven't launched yet you begin to think that through so I did this exercise a bit for what I'm working on with my valuables brand where I'm like okay what can I base my content around the next few months it's like cool we have launched July 30th it's a bunch of launch content

10:44 we have like a secondary launch I'm basically preparing for pushing some more product we got a lot to start I'm like all right we're have like a secondary launch it's one there I'm going to China and so I'm going to visit my factories which is like a set and that's going to be a whole event that happens right there we're talking about doing complex con this year and having the brand at complexcon so that would be a big thing that happens in November I'm looking at doing a Meetup in New York and a meet up in LA and it's like all right cool let's incorporate that even though it's kind of my Meetup but me as a main character of The Brand I'm putting that out in there I want to do this next photo shoot I want to be more of a community photo shoot invite out a bunch of like my influencer friends and stuff and do um do like a race it's one of the ideas we're working on and I'm like all right cool that would be an event and that would also involve a bunch of these other folks and you could start to see like even with me as a smaller brand that isn't spending much of money doesn't have a huge team like the team is me I can basically start building out here's the things that are

11:29 happening here's things that I want to happen here's where they fall on the calendar okay shoot I need to make this content or that content and that brings us to the second part of this once you've mapped all that out you can make a narrative content plan this is like what is happening that pushes your Brand's agenda throughout this next year I like to map out a year and so what I walk through with companies is this strategy of year anchors your seasonal plan and your weekly plan so the year anchors what we call Fame Builders and fame Builders is pulled from um another like a like another like like cinematic writing exercise it's not my original term but basically that's this idea that things are going to happen once or twice a year they're going try to get you the most attention you possibly can huge product release big debut of something big media Sprint holiday ad spend whatever it is but you want to basically say we have these one or two things happening every year that are super important to us for Apple that could be

12:14 the keynote they give where they released all their new products right and you want to kind of identify what those are and then make sure you have a specific content plan for that then you have your seasonal plan I break this down to Seasons and stories it's like all right what are we doing and what's happening for us that are you know what what are our key things in spring summer fall Etc and then within that like what are the various stories that we're trying to get across we need to get across inside that so we map out in our seasonal plan so okay in the fall we've got these two product releases where we have to move some of this other inventory we have or we have these four app updates we're announcing our new influencer team or whatever that is like that's the you handling that inside your seasonal plan you map that out and then you get cand and break it down to a week plan there's two sides of this you have series and so if you if you've been in Cut 30 you've seen some my cont videos talk a lot about series what's recurring thing you can do way I have like a series called brand battle I have a series called products brand I have a

13:00 status series these are all series I have as a Creator and that's something that every week I want to consider do I do those every week or every two weeks um you know what's the right Cadence but I want to continually release those series much like a TV show this YouTube I do every Sunday at the same time is a series I do in your week plan you want to prepare for that and have that be something You' thought there then you have specials what's the thing that we should do that's outside of the norm where we're trying something new but we're putting some atttention and time into it and that's like a special the way you might see like on you know 2our special on TNT right all this is pulled right from TV plot devices and then we have our ongoing content just regular stuff which is pillars and Trends and so pillars is if you are a brand coming up with a couple Core Concepts things you repeat all the time so we have a product showcase where we do a man on the street or green screen feature walkthroughs or news or whatever it is you have this kind of recurring content that does well for you that you sub it now as a pillar and that's stuff you put in your weekly content what are those actually identify

13:46 those what the content does good for us we do storytelling carousels we you know like going back to the midday squares example they're going to basically say any challenges they have in the week they're probably going to look at it and be like let's make a video about that challenge and how we overcame it and then there's trends for a lot of Brands you should be looking at right cool there's these visual Trends going around where people compile all their footage or put together or people are dropping their wallets and showing off their fits or whatever it is this audio is doing well like it's worth kind of thinking through and trying some of those ideas out for a lot of product teams and for everything on this from the fame Builders to the stories that are happening inside your season to your Trend videos to your series to your specials you ask these five questions this gets to be a huge document which is a good thing because you have you can begin to build a thorough content plan just doing this exercise okay what's the plot where does this tie in how can I build up the drama or the intention around it and who are the characters so

14:31 for instance if I'm doing a Fame Builder we're debuting a huge product Who's involved the CEO do we want to get our influencer team involved how can we get our community involved and then having that lens of like from the opponent perspective what's our competition going to think how are they going to respond how can we predict that how can we get ahead of that in our messaging like it's that stuff that's really begins to be an edge and then what's set where are we going to do this content right like like I'm looking at my seasonal plan for this fall for my brand personally and I'm going cool I have my typical Studio set I have the sets where we're going to be doing our photo shoots I'm going to China and I'm there for that for a week that's a set you know and what can I take advantage of filming there make sure that's interesting then what assets do we need might is you creating long form assets short form assets written carousels videos series videos begin to actually look at granularly as we go through these things in these and like inside this narrative line like what do we actually want to get out of it and then what networks they going to go on

15:17 right oh we're not spending enough time on LinkedIn we want to have a different approach on LinkedIn so we should create assets specific to that but you begin to work this out into a spreadsheet you have a you know you have a significant amount of content that's built out within it and a significant amount of ideas for people to go flesh out and you'll find if you're doing this exercise whether it's just you with like a pen and paper or a big notion dock or it's a team with a whiteboard and an offsite tons comes of it and tons of rabbit holes come to it you can begin to really look at okay let's find our pillars let's find our series you can see like the workshops I did for this for like a day sometimes two days and uh I really try try to give it to a day but because you actually get into this like all right once we've actually mapped out all those people are now we start going into this narrative plan you can spend 90 minutes just on what your content pillars are or how we should find Identify some specific Trends right now to make our content better immediately or hey let's actually map out our series

16:04 plan our specials plan for the next 12 months based on our release calendar you start to get really granular with this so I want to give some actual examples you can see how I think about it and these examples I'm not saying people have sat down and done this exercise necessarily some Brands it's very natural just to be like this like I don't think represent has planned to have basically what I just explained as a big part of their marketing narrative is natural to them it's just happened it's why part of why they're successful they are ingrained in it a lot of Brands is not natural and in fact it's good to think through with intention even if you are natural to see how you can do it better represents an amazing example for this for a few reasons first is characters George Heaton CEO is a character and he is a as important to the brand as the brand itself in my opinion but he's not the only character for the brand you have his brother Michael heon telling a different type of Brand Story a More Design focused Brand Story more introverted brand story but

16:50 also important and presenting in a similar way equally on brand and content kind of rolls out and is shown between the two of their accounts but then they also have influencers and whether it's paid for whether they're sponsored or not doesn't quite matter like Pier Lon I don't know if he's like a rep sponsored person but he wears a lot of rep and he gets a lot of people considering wearing represent his content functions as a promotional piece for the brand he wears other brands and stuff too so again I'm not sure what the relationship looks like but he is someone that is a character of their brand more more secondary they also sponsor athletes for instance this guy is like a high rocks represent athlete so anyone that's a pro team and characters a great way to think about characters is like surf you know sponsored Surfers sponsored skaters sponsored athletes for a brand those are all characters in The Brand Story I of think they're very underutilized in terms of brand stories but that's a great way to think about this is like any of those people are also involved with the brand a brand I worked with for a really

17:37 long time where we made this the pro team a huge part of the Brand Story is lift foils and so U both the Florence brothers are are John and Nathan are both sponsored by LIF foils they also have a like a kind of a massive Rider lineup of people small and large from the Florence Brothers to you know to Annie to uh this guyy just absolutely rips andah heiti um to to to smaller kind of up and comers like Brady to like Brian to Super established and Brian's in a ton of the content including much of the viral content that we did while I was there but they're building up kind of this this like wide team of people that of all different backgrounds right like like Mal is a younger a younger Rider right um Yago is like an environmentalist who also happens to be like like a foiler Zayn represents like the Australia but basically those characters are all people that are telling the brand narrative and they were really really involved in how we

18:22 put this together like like with the brand and that's a traditional like you know Sports surf angle but like is super relevant today in social media and you'll see those people are all like in the content and sharing content on their pages and brand should look at that like very closely that's a good example like represent is doing that exact same thing they have people sponsored like that so they have their characters that are doing the brand they have all these kind of models and influencers related to it they have people that work at the brand have their social media they have George and Michael themselves so a lot of character and you look at sets in the same way where their office is a set their office is a huge gy it comes up a ton inside their content they open their La store they're always filming content inside their La store George has some kind of like Los Angeles Mansion or something like that that they're always shooting at like they're always at airwan like they have set up a bunch of these different places that they can shoot at at any point in time whether it's their YouTube series Etc where they're actually able to Leverage The

19:08 Brand and leverage the fact they have characters and they have sets and they're releasing things relatively constantly to basically move the plot forward but then let's look at that plot and the things that are happening with them right opening that La store was a huge event every time the George goes back and forth from the UK to California if you're watch it following your social media it feels like an event they release product constantly that that's an event they have collaborations they just have like a a Duke and Dexter collab and that's event they the other Founders and stuff are tied into that they're releasing an airwan smoothie that's an event that you know you can go tap into you they're doing a boxing capsule or a collaboration again all those things get to list out in the calendar of like we have all these things happening we need to make content from them how are our key people representing that are we putting it on YouTube we're putting it on Instagram what are we running for ads they are an excellent example of just fluid brand narrative happening constantly we got a Metallica collection we have a boxing collection and then you look at content

19:54 types you're like all right cool sometimes we're just doing 3D you know like they're able to add in layers of stuff obviously they have like all the resources in the world to be doing this as a brand that's like really skyrocketing but it's a really interesting way to Think Through how any brand should function and this whole idea of character and TV show that's not contrived at all it's naturally what's happening with the brand the personalities around it and they're playing into it really well and the last we'll talk about is Poppy cuz I want always be using fashion examples right so poppy is really interesting because they have a couple devices right they were on the founder was on Shark Tank and got invested on on Shark Tank and that kind of plays out in their content that's a big event and because of that the founder being on TV the founder was a part of the brand narrative they were also one of the early accounts actually get Creator working on their account my friend JT Barnett you've probably heard talk about um sourcing creators for Brands a lot I think actually helped them get creators involved in their

20:39 account and nail that strategy before but they have a combo now of like the CEO is a character the different creators they have as a character their employees as characters inside the poppy brand and then what they're doing as far as plot is they're releasing new flavors all the time they're getting into new retailers or doing big things like running a Super Bowl campaign they always have the ability to fall back on like the Shark Tank narrative they used to have and they're positioning themsel in in really interesting ways like I think they're uh they're not like dunking on ollipop or anything all the time but they're definitely like having an enemy and there's another brand going like toe for toe for them and like ollipop is definitely much more cheeky in their social media like throwing some shots at poppy which is interesting and but again like part of that like enemy Ally structure but then both of them are positioned against big soda right but they have to dance with that lightly they want to get acquired by a Coca-Cola or a Pepsi group right and so they can't go at them hard hard hard because that

21:25 might then dissuade someone in the boardroom but at the same time you have to be like reminding people this is a much more healthier alternative to the soda you grew up with that's a message that comes across inside everything and even the little things like having their you know street team members walk around with the little poppy backpacks they are creating tons of different narratives characters have the same through lines through this um and all the ways that we've talked about it right and this is and what I like about this is this is the kind of thing you could come up with with a plan like the represent stuff a lot of it's natural they have really charismatic people involved in the brand they're doing a lot of these releases they're doing interesting things they built interesting places it takes a while to get that infrastructure together if you can even get there at all but someone like poppy if you have any company that's selling in cpg you can begin to think of that structure like what is our origin story how do we replay it what stores are we going into what are we positioned against categorically in the world what creators do we use what team members do we use

22:10 how do we get our street team of members involved how are we constantly releasing new flavors getting feedback and then having a plot around that we tease it people guess and then we release it once we release it we actually go on like a tour like they're able to kind of really put that out there in an interesting way I think they done a great job with it and I'll leave you with how I'm thinking about this as a new brand right so I'm getting ready to have my first launch in a few weeks I don't have the resources or the size of some of the other brands that are out there I'm talking about here like how do you have characters right so I'm a character obviously this is a brand that is largely based on the fact that I am an influencer with a large following but I also wanted to go beyond that so I'm looking at okay I have people I'm seating with the product I want to be involved I like to tell the story like um toga who designed some of the stuff his he's tagged in some of the things people know that he's like a part of it design some things inside of it my Factory in uh crease group I talk about

22:56 a lot inside of this are WF like character and a set and there's some interplay in there because I'm very open about the brand one of the main Concepts is like it's like an open source brand I'm going to tell you all my suppliers I'm going to show you a bunch of how it's done it's a brand that helps build Brands the concept I love and really resonates with how I make my content so I'm bringing into the brand so that also means that cool I'm not afraid to show you my supplier go work with my supplier I'm working with them all the time going to China with them or talking back and forth I want them to thrive and succeed and that as a character and the people in there like yah who's the art director there I worked with on on the on the shoot here he makes cont he is like there's probably some interplay there same thing with all my boys right so landforce or Zack Kravitz or Ashwin or you know or Brandon from blank like these are all friends of mine right there's going to be some interplay the way I post about blank stuff that like you know maybe some of my stuff's in his videos he's wearing a shirt or whatever

23:42 it is or you know like Zach's worn valuable content Alex Garcia's worn you know shirts and valuable content like how do I make that into a bigger play right that's begin what you think about it's like who are my people and that's why there's a huge benefit to being to having some kind of web following not just because of the followers but because of the network right the ability to say all right I want people to be a part of my brain Story how do iiz them to do that how do we get people excited how do we actually execute that all right so thank you for watching I hope you got some value out of this just a reminder that like I want you out to run this like go run it for your brand use it for freelance clients use it if you're at an agency uh it doesn't belong to me it belongs to the Internet it's an amalgamation of like exercises I've been in things I've found online things that I've come up with myself like all all put into one thing that I think is super valuable for Brands and if you change it or you update it or you find things to add to it please share it with me um as I do a lot less exercises and consults

24:29 and stuff as I go to launch my own brand I'm just trying to push all those tools out there for other people to use and and run with I'm out here in Miami it's by last week before my brand has its final launch and then I head out to China so lot going on we'll be documenting all of it and appreciate yall coming along for the ride thank you very much