Kimba

Brand language and brand guidelines.

How do you get a Freelance Copywriter excited?

Send them an email that starts off like this:

Hi Jonathan,

We’re on the lookout for a brilliant, outside of the box thinking copywriter and want to explore the possibility of working together.

We have been working on a very special town branding project for a small town in South Australia (population around 1000 people.) We’re getting close to finalising the overarching strategy, as well as the creative expression.

As a part of the project, we will require a copywriter to help with creating the brand book and all copy content.

Then you wait for the Copywriter to pick themselves up off the floor.

And then you send a second email that says:

Before we jump into a call, I would love to see if we could align on budget as am cautious of not wasting your time if the budget doesn’t align.

They told me their budget. We aligned. Happy days.

G’day Australia and hello 4am email exchanges

My new client was SGK, a global packaging and brand experience company. I was dealing with their strategy team in the Sydney Office.

Their client was a little town, literally halfway across Australia, called Kimba. Less than 100 years old, the town had grown to a whopping population of 1,000. But they were shrinking. Now down to about 600 townsfolk, it was getting critical. They needed to entice new people in to live a real bit of Australian life.

The brief, in a nutshell:

– Write the brand’s central manifesto

– Define the key voice principles

– Create samples of market-facing copy to illustrate the Tone of Voice

– Write a big bunch of key messages

– And re-write the full Brand Book.

They needed value propositions and a messaging toolkit for four key audiences:

And real life examples to kick start their internal marketing machine:

We got things rolling with a design team, strategy team and me team meeting on 4th August. And after a couple more meetings and feedback sessions, everything was signed off on the 29th.

A 25-day whirlwind across the time zones. And I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.

My client was brilliant. The brief was brilliant. The results were brilliant. (In this Copywriter’s opinion).

And unless I’m reading the signs wrong, I think the client enjoyed the ride too:

“Working with you was smooth sailing. You understood our unique project needs straight away
and delivered work that was beyond our expectations. A fantastic writer and lovely human being. We are excited to work with you again. Thanks Jonathan!”
Romina Torres – Brand Strategist, SGK (Australia)

Ooh, bragging rights update. I’ve just found out Kimba and its agency won Silver at the ANZ Transform Awards in Sydney on 20th November 2024, for Best Place Brand. FYI, Transform Magazine is ‘the only global magazine to cover the transformative power of brand strategy and design’. Bingo!

For more tone of voice / brand guidelines work, have a look at the Miro case study