Alva

A brand communications playbook to support the everyday comms

Brand strategy, Comms strategy, Internal comms, PR & media, Experience design, Change enablement

The challenge

Jyväskylä Energy changed its name to Alva in 2019. At the same time the company renewed their business and brand startegy. Alva has a strong, capable team in marketing and communications, but in the new situation they wanted external views and sparring to clarify the new brand’s communications and focus points to support the everyday communications tasks.

The solution

Positioning a new brand requires visible action. In order to realize Alva’s vision and the new business and brand strategy in the best possible way, we set out to find ways to make the differentiating competitive advantages visible, to communicate diversely about different actions and aspects of the company, and above all, to recognize different audiences’ needs in different phases of their user journeys. At the same time, it was important for Alva to do all of this in a way that was easy to apply to their everyday work in communications.

Already a lot of good work had been done prior to this project to define the new Alva. Some of it was created when our sister company frankly helped Alva to renew their brand strategy and develop customer experience.

With the help of the prior work and a new comms design workshop we were able to dig in to, clarify and ideate their audiences’ needs, priorities and future direction for the brand communications together with the Alva team.

After the workshop we gathered and further developed the needs, notions and new ideas to clear guidelines, which together formed a practical brand communications guide – a “brand playbook”. The playbook is an everyday tool to help the communications team to plan and direct their resources to the most significant communications tasks and themes for each audience, while being able to manage the brand as a whole as well. 

The brand communications playbook includes e.g.:

  • Description of the brand and its communications style 

  • Description of the desired customer experience and communications’ role in enabling and ensuring it 

  • Strategic goals and metrics for communications 

  • Descriptions of the defined communications audiences

  • Key messages for each audience

  • Content priorities and ideas for each audience

  • Prioritized and recommended communications actions for each audience 

  • Defined communications channels and their roles 

  • Guides to implement and develop brand communications in everyday work

Client

Alva

Industry

Energy, Resources & Mining

Type of work

Brand strategy
Comms strategy
Internal comms
PR & media
Experience design
Change enablement

Year

2020

Client description

Alva is the maker of the future in water and energy services. For decades Alva has offered its water and energy services know-how in the Jyväskylä region in Finland. Today Alva offers these solutions nationally, and to some extent also internationally.