Inside the Bud Believability Framework: Are Your Brand Intentions Believable?

Every story starts with an author and a narrative that they want to share with the world. But before readers start to believe and resonate with this story, the author first needs to be clear about what they’re really trying to say.

Brands are the same. Behind every product should be a story that they’re trying to get audiences to buy into.

Determining the strength of these stories is the starting point of Bud’s Believability Framework: Brand Intentions. This is the first of three dimensions under our proprietary tool, which analyses what a brand says about itself, and whether that story holds together or falls apart the more one tries to understand it.

This might sound like the easy part. A brand authors its own message, after all. But not all brands have proven themselves to be experts at this. Many can be operating in multiple languages, catering to markets that have differing consumer habits and preferences, or via regional teams and agencies who each answer to their own deadlines. Meanwhile, other brands could be force-fitting global campaigns to an unfit region, running the same message word-for-word without adjusting for what's different on the ground.

These are just a few realities that brands across the region are working with, which is why they need to get their stories straight in the first place.

In order to help brands reach that point, we evaluate their Brand Intentions score across three pieces of criteria: clarity, cohesion & consistency, and believability of aspiration.

Clarity

Clarity is about whether a brand's core position can be understood by someone who is encountering it for the first time. We don’t mean the tagline or the latest campaign header. What is the overarching message that the brand wants to communicate? 

Message clarity is a foundational idea, and one that most brands assume they’re already doing well at. However, that’s mainly because they evaluate themselves one channel at a time. Once they assess multiple touchpoints, the question changes. Will audiences be able to properly express what the brand stands for then? 

More often than not, lining up a website, a press release, a CEO’s interview talking points, and a sales deck side-by-side will usually reveal story drifts. No one on the internal teams catches it because they’re not usually reading all four back to back. 

Cohesion and Consistency

The next piece of criteria, cohesion and consistency, goes beyond what's being said and dives into how it is communicated. Does the brand feel like the same entity everywhere it shows up?

If someone runs into a brand on LinkedIn, at an industry event, and in a press release, there may or may not be inconsistencies in how it comes across on all three platforms. A consistent brand will be telling the same narrative on every channel, while an inconsistent one might sound like it is telling three different versions of its story - one from the social team, one from events, and one from the communications team.

Brand teams are typically confident that their own channel is on-brand, but like clarity, the disparities only become visible once the channels are lined up and evaluated next to each other. It’s why an external evaluation will always help. A set of fresh eyes may do a better job at spotting discrepancies that internal teams may already be missing.

Believability of Aspiration

The third criterion under brand intentions is believability of aspiration, which looks into whether or not a brand's stated vision matches what it's actually proven capable of doing.

It's the toughest of the three to fake, because it's the one that is most likely to expose real distance between ambition and evidence. It's the author's ambition running ahead of the story they’ve actually earned the right to tell, for example.

Would a sceptical, informed stakeholder believe the brand’s aspiration, or would they notice the gap straight away? If there's a strong match between the two, audience buy-in follows fairly naturally. If there isn't, audiences rarely call the brand out directly. They just quietly stop engaging and start discounting whatever the brand says next.

A brand that scores low in this criterion isn't necessarily lying about its capability. It's usually just ahead of itself, talking about a future capability as though it's already been delivered, when the proof to back that up hasn't caught up yet. The goal is to make sure that both ambition and evidence are running at the same pace.

Where This Shows Up in Practice

One client we’re currently working with has exactly this kind of gap. Imagine a global brand building a stronger presence in Asia, but constrained by a global message that doesn’t necessarily resonate with the region. Products differed between geographies. The landscape that each market was operating in varied too, with different regulations and audience realities.

The second gap was that many competitors were communicating similar messages. In some cases, they were even saying it better or had more proof than our client did. So even where the global story held up, it wasn't distinct enough to be ownable in this market.

Our work has focused on closing both gaps. Together we’ve built a more distinctive narrative and grounded it in what the brand can deliver in Asia, as opposed to a copy of the global position. The work is still in progress, but the shift has already translated into stronger business outcomes.

It's a useful case for what Brand Intentions measure. Most brands do have the story; they just need to refine it, localise it, distinguish it, or make it click with audiences.

Even then, getting the story straight doesn't mean a brand has solved its believability problem. What you say is only the first thing you're measured against. Audiences still have to experience the brand for themselves, and the results still have to hold up once they go looking for them. But brands should at least set up their main narratives and arguments well. That’s the foundation.

Ready to understand what your Brand Intention looks like and how that plays into your brand’s overall Believability? Talk to us below.