There is one common and key aspect that makes brands successful and that is a strong brand strategy. Without a good and strong brand strategy, no business can survive in today’s competitive market. Consumers are constantly being bombarded by advertisements from brands and the internet has made it more targeted, based on the interest of the individual consumer.
But it is not the advertisement that influences the purchase decision of a consumer, rather it is the brand strategy. We will discuss this whole brand strategy concept in this post in detail and also, we will figure out how you can use the brand strategy in your business to stand out from your competitors and make a good first impression in your consumer’s mind.
The first and most important element of a brand strategy is to build a unified brand identity. A unified brand strategy includes everything from your logo, colours, pictures, videos, infographics, fonts, tone of communication, customer support services, etc.
You should keep in mind that without a unified identity, everything from your content, to your culture, to your core business can suffer. This problem is pervasive and there is a reason for that.
Since, building a strong and effective brand strategy takes time, effort, and dedication. This is where many brands get stuck and ignore this important aspect of the marketing mix.
How to Get Started with the Brand Strategy
Branding strategy begins with first answering a few very important questions.
Who are You?
- Understand who you truly are and use your beliefs and values to guide your decisions in ways that are better for your employees, customers, stakeholders, and your business.
- Communicate your brand consistently and effectively through every piece of content you create and publish.
- Attract the right type of audience to build a strong, and long-lasting brand.
- Position your brand in an effective way that helps you compete now and in the future with your competitors.
What Is a Brand?
There are a lot of definitions for a “brand.” Usually, when people talk about a brand, they refer to the logo or a name to identify the business. But, in reality, a brand is more than a physical mark or a logo. It is an emotional mark than a physical mark. It is an emotional experience, that is strengthened or weakened by every engagement of the audience with that business and brand.
In a true sense, if you want to define a brand then it is what people think, feel, and say about your business. And keep in mind that it is quite different from marketing. Marketing is what you tell people about your brand. Whereas branding is what you want people to think and perceive about your business.
Simply putting a brand is simply what people think, feel and talk about your business.
What is a Brand Strategy?
Now you should know that creating an effective brand is not an easy task. Creating a brand is an entire strategy called “Brand Strategy”. As we explained above that brand is not just the logo or the name of your business, rather it is what people feel about your brand.
Brand strategy is actually a plan for systematic brand development in alignment with the business strategy.
A brand strategy helps understand who are and the purpose of your brand. It acts as a blueprint to help you communicate your brand messaging.
Why Do You Need a Brand Strategy?
Your business will suffer and won’t see its full potential if you don’t know who you are, why your business exists, what you believe in as a business, and what your business intends to achieve.
Without a brand strategy, you may have customer communication problems, even you may face employee retention issues. A lack of brand strategy can cause problems at every level of the organization.
Without a brand strategy, you may not understand your purpose, vision, mission, or values. Even if you know you may not be able to communicate the same to the others. You may make marketing and business decisions that don’t reflect them.
If you don’t have your marketing strategy properly documented, your marketing plan might not work the way you expect.
You may face challenges with your team and employees, because they will be in a state of confusion, without a clear objective, they may also feel disengaged and lose interest in doing what they are expected to do.
Without a brand strategy, your content and communication will be inconsistent and contradictory. Your content that way may not be able to attract the right audience for your brand.
A brand strategy clearly tells you what type of content should you produce and what should it convey to your audience.
Also, without a good brand strategy, you may not be able to make your brand presence the way you want.
So, it is clearly evident that without a brand strategy your brand might not flourish.
Build Your Brand Strategy Team
Keep in mind that no one person can build a brand strategy. You need a team to build, and bring it to life. If you try to do it alone you may not get it right, and probably your project will be side-tracked.
You don’t need a lot of people in your brand strategy team. Two-three people with the right set of skills and experience can craft a good brand strategy for your brand. If you can’t do it yourself you should consider hiring a branding consultant.
Important Things You Should Know Before You Start Working on Your Brand Strategy
If you are starting to build your brand strategy from scratch or changing your brand strategy, there are a few important things you should know beforehand.
Who is Your Audience?
First, you need to answer who are you trying to sell to, what your audience wants, how can you meet their needs.
This simply means that in order to really connect with your audience you need to have a good brand strategy that clearly tells you who is your audience whom you are trying to attract.
When you know your audience and their needs you can fulfill then it would be easier for you to determine how to serve them and how to communicate and engage with them. In other words, it clearly defines who you are i.e., your brand heart.
Who are Your Competitors?
The next important thing to keep in consideration while creating your brand strategy is knowing who are your competitors. When you know about your competitors you can compare your strengths and weaknesses.
Also, it helps you clearly differentiate yourself from the competition and you can refine your communication strategy for your audience so that you can attract them and retain them.
When you are ready with this information you can start to create your brand strategy in a real sense. Let’s now move ahead and see how to create your brand strategy.
How to Create Your Brand Strategy?
Building brand strategy is a step-by-step process. If you want to create a comprehensive brand strategy that helps you share your story effectively at every touchpoint.
Find Your Brand Heart
Every brand has some beliefs that influence everything they do. These beliefs are the Brand heart. The brand heart could be the potent force to accelerate your business or even sabotage it all together. If your brand heart and business are aligned you can surely bring your customers, employees, and community together for building the future of your brand. But, if your brand heart is not aligned with your business or have no brand heart at all you may make decisions that can derail your business and long-term goals.
A brand heart is comprised of four elements that help you establish who you are, what you do, and why is it important to have the brand heart (the basic set of beliefs of your brand).
- Vision: What future do we want to help create and what does the future look like for our brand?
- Mission: What are we here to do and how do we create the future we aspire to create?
- Values: What principles guide our behaviour?
- Purpose: Why do we exist?
The seasoned marketing and business consultants first work on this. In short, it is termed as VMV framework. Everything, right from the brand logo, colours, messaging, content, images, icons, fonts, etc., is decided from this VMV framework. Do not keep it in your mind only. Rather document it and keep it in a safe place for sharing it with your partners, stakeholders, marketing and communications team, etc.
Craft Your Brand Messaging
Once you have your brand heart it is time for you to craft your brand messaging. Since you know through your brand heart who you are, now you need to figure out your brand essence. That means you need to express who you are.
A good example here is De Beers’ tag line “A Diamond is Forever.” It clearly says that the company is into selling diamonds and how valuable the diamonds are. Next is your brand messaging that you need to figure out. This is how you should talk about who you are. Once you have these written and documented you can ensure that your brand will communicate honestly, consistently, and authentically. We will discuss both Brand Essence and Brand Messaging in this post going further.
Some brands make the mistake of jumping right to creating their logo and other visual identity elements when their brand heart is ready. But, before that, it is necessary to think about Brand Essence and Brand Messaging.
Keep in mind that the logo, colours, and typography, are vital to a brand, but they are ultimately a visual translation of your brand’s essence and brand messaging. It is obvious that if you don’t know what you’re trying to communicate, it’s difficult to create a visual brand identity and truly depict a real brand image.
If you don’t have a brand name yet and you are yet to decide on your brand name read How to Choose Business Name for Your Start-Up.
Create Your Brand Essence
First of all, you should know that the brand essence consists of:
- Your brand’s personality
- Brand’s Voice
- Brand’s tone
If you are thinking about what is this and how do you create these for your brand then don’t worry, we will discuss all these in detail. Keep in mind that your brand’s essence is inherent, you don’t need to manufacture it artificially. All you need to do is discover and document it.
Identify Your Brand Personality
Your brand’s personality is basically your brand’s human characteristics and attributes. Like the human being’s brands are enthusiastic, sophisticated, wild and crazy, etc. For instance, a brand dealing in mountain trekking and jungle safari has a wild personality.
Your brand personality is a clear reflection of your brand heart, it is influenced by your brand beliefs and demonstrated in the behavior. If you have a good understanding of your brand personality you can implement it into every aspect of your brand right from your product descriptions to your company information pages, and customer service process. It’s a very powerful way to differentiate your brand from the rest of the competition.
Identify Your Brand Voice
Every brand has its own voice. Make your brand voice that speaks its own language. For instance, a packaged food brand won’t have the voice that an automobile or a telecom brand would have. Your brand personality influences your brand voice.
Articulate your brand personality and voice in a way that can be communicated throughout your content and every other part of your brand. Important thing is to keep in mind that how your audience wants to hear from your brand and think about your brand. How your brand looks and speaks helps build your brand perception in your customer’s mind.
Identify Your Brand Tone
Your general attitude is your brand tone. A brand’s tone should be authoritative but respectful and polite. Keep in mind that a brand is a living personality of a company like a living human being. Every individual human being has a unique way to talk but they do change their tone depending on what context they are talking in. Similarly, brands also have a unique way of talking and the tones may change depending upon the context. A brand’s tone is optimistic, caring, and helpful.
How to Create Brand Messaging
We briefly discussed brand messaging earlier. In your brand messaging you should start with the very basic i.e., value proposition, tagline, messaging pillars, etc. So, let’s explore these, one by one.
Value Proposition
Your value proposition is both the emotional and functional benefits of the products and services that you offer to your customers. It includes your brand positioning and also how you solve your customer’s problems and why they should choose you over the competition.
Your value proposition is in simple terms is what your customers will receive if they buy your products or services. You need to have the answer to this question beforehand to make your brand a success. All your content, messages going forward will support and reinforce your value proposition.
Tagline
Now you need a tagline for your brand. A tagline is a sentence, word, or phrase that summarizes your market position. But, keep in mind that only the good and catchy taglines are remembered by the people. Coming up with great taglines is not easy and requires a lot of brainstorming and iterations.
There are many online sites that generate taglines for you, but if you do it properly yourself or with help of a branding company you will get a better and well-thought-out tagline for your brand.
Messaging Pillars
Messaging pillars are the key stories you want to tell about your brand. It consists of what makes your brand unique and different. It includes your brand promise, brand story, manifesto, elevator pitch, founder’s story, and the origin of the brand. The idea is to make people believe in your brand every time they interact with your brand physically or virtually.
Design Your Visual Identity
As the final step in creating your brand strategy, you should create your visual identity. That means the logo, colors, typography, imagery, etc. Technically these branding elements are the face of your brand. When you create your brand’s visual identity keep in mind that it should be purposeful, it is for the future not just today. Hence, a good visual identity is:
- Flexible: Your brand’s visual identity should be created in such a way that it keeps growing with your brand. If you do that you won’t need to change it when you launch new products, services, or even enter new industries.
- Comprehensive: Your brand’s visual identity should be comprehensive so that the designers and content creators have a complete set of tools and information to do their job properly.
- Intuitive: By intuitive means that all the brand elements are constructed in such a manner that they complement each other.
Depending on the need and time you may want to expand your visual identity over time. If you build your brand with everything discussed here in mind it would be easy to keep expanding your visual identity without affecting your brand’s real heart. For instance, if going forward you need to make some animations or videos which you haven’t done initially you can do that right if your brand strategy is built properly.
Now let’s discuss the elements of visual brand identity.
Brand Logo
A brand logo is the most important element of a brand. It reflects your brand and that’s how your audience identifies your products and brand. A logo needs to be simple and memorable. Do you know that according to research the simplest logos are the memorable ones? Think of McDonald’s logo or the Apple logo. They are simple yet memorable.
So keep your logo simpler. You can choose to be a text logo or a logo that is built into some kind of shape. Or you can choose a combination of both. But, the most important thing to keep in mind is that how your audience is going to visually process and assign meaning to your logo. Obviously, you don’t want to leave a bad impression on your audience’s minds.
Typography
If you choose to have a text-based logo then the typography is an extension of that. Hence, it is best that you start with your logo design so that you can decide the fonts and typography based on that. Typography is very important today because your audience is consuming your content on various platforms like websites, packaging, mobile applications, brochures, etc. So, while choosing your typography keep in mind that it aligns with your brand and also the applications and platforms they will be used on.
Colour
Colour is one of the most powerful elements of a brand and when done correctly into branding it can make a real miracle. Marketing researchers and seasoned branding professionals say that color can affect everything from brand perception to purchasing intent. Colours can evoke emotions and most of the buying decisions are influenced by emotions.
Imagery
Images and very important. You might have heard the saying that a picture can tell a thousand words. Well, that’s true. Your brand is now communicated through visual media on websites, mobile applications, posters, product packaging.
Keep in mind that whether you choose photography, illustrations, or both, just keep in mind that it all should align with your brand and brand strategy. You can choose a lot of copyright-free images in your content and branding, or you can also choose to create your own images or buy the ones you need from the stock photography sites.
Illustrations
Undoubtedly illustrations are a smart way to visually brand your content. But, it is important to keep in mind that you keep your illustrations clear and clutter-free. Cluttered illustrations are confusing and are considered visual junk.
Create Your Brand Manual
Your brand manual is the playbook for how to use your brand specifically in the content, logo, images, illustrations, and tone of communication you create. Most of the brands have challenges in maintaining quality and consistency if they work with freelancers or agencies. In such situations, your brand manual can help you keep your brand consistent.
Keep in mind that your brand manual should include enough direction to empower anyone working with your brand. In the long run, it helps you strengthen your brand. Include directions for both your visual and verbal brand identity in your brand manual, so that everyone is on the same page that is working with your brand.
Verbal guidelines
- Brand essence (personality, voice, tone)
- Messaging pillars
- Tagline
- Value proposition
- Anything else helpful or relevant
Visual guidelines
- Colour
- Data visualization
- Hierarchy
- Iconography
- Imagery (photography, illustration)
- Interactive elements
- Logo
- Typography
- Video and motion
Once you’ve completed your brand manual, make sure you have a designated point person who can answer questions about applying the brand guidelines correctly. Keep your brand manual in a place where it can be accessed by your team. The good idea is to keep it in both digital and print formats.
Conclusion
To implement your brand strategy effectively going forward you need to follow the best practices, create content that is aligned to your brand, maximize your content reach, and tell your brand story at every touchpoint. Also, make sure that your content gets in front of the right audience.
