A recurrent question we receive is this: “I’m not a marketer. What is brand strategy, and why should I be interested?” It stems from two things: a narrow definition of what brand is and how it applies to business; and a lack of understanding as to why brand strategy matters. Our view is that a successful brand strategy lights a path from where things are now for a business to where opportunity seems strongest. It does this through the organisation’s brands.
What is a brand strategy?
A brand strategy helps you identify the specific choices to win in your marketplace. What you decide and what you rule out determines where your brand sits in the market, what you offer, how you outsmart others in your field and how you achieve the margins you’re looking for.
So – what exactly do brands do? And why is brand strategy important?
If you’re a business that owns a brand and trades through that brand, your brand represents you. It gives customers something to look for. It brings a name, visual identity, presence and personality to everything that you do as a business. A successful brand engages people and forges a relationship with them.
Here’s how the folks at Bynder sum up brand strategy: “A brand strategy revolves around all the intangible elements that over time drive brand awareness, brand equity, and brand sentiment.” Those are, in effect, all the things that drive recall and long-term value.
Think about any successful brand – and you should be able to draw some immediate associations. Coke, Apple, John West, Ford Uniglo … No matter what the sector, these companies project personality through their brands that bring them alive. That’s no coincidence. That’s a hard-working brand strategy doing what it’s designed to do.
A successful brand strategy personifies your business objectives via a brand with tangible and memorable characteristics that customers value. Get this right and people feel like they know you. You actually mean something to them beyond what you’re selling. You’re not just another drink, soap, car, aluminium component, laptop or flight. You are a specific choice.
Getting to that point takes conscious effort.
The role of a brand strategy is to resolve what you want customers to look for, why that’s more noticeable and interesting than what others offer, how you can make it feel valuable. It’s not an action plan for marketing nor the rationale for creative work. Instead …
A guide for the brand’s longer future
A brand strategy is the business case for what seems to be the brand’s best future: an extrapolation of what success could be for that brand, based on what’s known. Because of that, a robust brand strategy is rational and yet intentional, declarative and yet adjustable, speculative and yet measured. As a strategic framework, it should paint a picture of what’s possible beyond present realities.
In almost every case, even if the case for change is urgent (more on that below), you’re building something that the business itself will grow into. Like a hermit crab. Once you’ve outgrown your current shell, you need to find a new one to grow into – perhaps over the next 3 – 5 years. That’s what you’re developing with a brand strategy. An understanding of that shell. Because if you develop anything smaller than that, you are only going to need a new shell, sooner.
But to get that right, a brand strategy should make the case for what’s ahead using a wider range of consideration factors than often get tabled – particularly if you want it to be meaningful to non-marketers.
If you’re responsible for developing a brand strategy, commissioning or assessing one for an established brand, what follows is not a table of contents. Rather, it’s a framework for what a brand strategy can (perhaps, should) include.
Further reading: Why linking your brand strategy, culture and stories matters
What should a brand strategy cover? Here’s a quick guide
- Discusses the role and contribution of brand(s) in the business
- Provides a prompt for why you need a brand strategy now
- Identifies your key audiences and what your brand currently means to them
- Describes the present reality for the brand (and why it is not flourishing)
- Looks at how the market and culture is changing
- Identifies a range of opportunities for where the brand could go – and recommends one
- Gives the brand a distinctive role in the marketplace
- Describes what success could look like
- Defines what the brand needs to embody
- Provides a watch list of key factors/complexities that could affect brand performance
Right, let’s take a closer look.
1. What do you actually want the brand to do for the business?
It’s important to identify and agree the actual role of a brand in the business. Why do have one – or more? Do you use them in combination to achieve a multiple presence in a market? Do you have brands in order to achieve a premium in terms of price or distribution?
What difference are you looking for your brand or brands to make for the business?
Brand is everybody’s business. Defining the business contribution of your brands builds agreement on their impacts and value at senior level and makes them a shared responsibility. Every brand strategy should start with this understanding. It makes brand strategy important to those who might otherwise have dismissed it.
When the reason for having brands goes unanswered, the linkage to the business and the role of the brand(s) in meeting business objectives goes undefined and unacknowledged. Brand is seen as a marketing cost rather than as a business asset.
Framing why you have brands and what you want them to achieve in the context of the business strategy sets the stage for informed investment based on a defined role.
2. Why do you need to develop a brand strategy now?
Creating and approving a brand strategy is no small task. It should be a substantial consideration. Here’s how to decide if you need a brand strategy. There should always be a major cue – with correspondingly large stakes to play for. If you’re an established company, a brand strategy usually stems from an action that you are looking to take, or a reaction to big changes in circumstances or the behaviours of competitors.
The fundamental driver we look for is “we can’t stay here” – meaning how you are currently perceived, positioned and/or priced is not aligned with your business objectives and will not work for you given what is happening around you. If your current standing as a brand is sound, stay as you are and make changes tactically.
If not, your strategy needs to clearly identify and articulate the problem you are looking to solve, why it needs to be acted on and why doing so will work to your advantage.
Without this, there is no basis for decision makers to objectively assess the strategy you will propose.
3. Who’s buying your brand? And who do you want to buy your brand?
A brand is no-one, literally, without an audience. Understanding the various layers of audience for your brand – from those who buy what you offer to those you need to talk to in order for your brand to mean something (media, regulators, investors) – is critical to crafting a brand for people.
It’s not the role of a brand strategy to understand all the details of the customer experience but you do need to know who buys and who decides, what they buy and what they don’t, their expectations and the perceptions of the brand that they are most drawn to, or not. If you want to shift or change your audience, you need to identify that clearly, and your motives for doing so.
You also need to test that your new audience is viable – large enough, profitable enough, engaged enough, accessible enough.
Data matters (and we’ll get to that) but your brand strategy needs to clearly reflect the human drivers. The people you appeal to. The ones you want to appeal to, to resolve the problem you identified. The audiences you are looking to leave behind as you change. And who you’re looking to invite to consider (a new version of) the brand.
4. What’s the current reality?
Every successful brand strategy needs an agreed starting point: the situation that the brand finds itself in at that point in time – good, bad and indifferent. This is not a place for sugarcoating. It should frankly portray what’s happening for the brand and what has prompted the need for change. The focus should be on what was expected of the brand and what has happened (instead).
Cue: the data. The assessment of the brand’s present reality should fuse facts, data, feedback, key opinions, analysis, results against metrics and financial impacts to provide a rounded view of the current reality.
Just as important as the information itself is the diversity and objectivity of the sources. We nearly always list these because they provide proof of groundwork. Important too to note not just what you have gleaned but what you have not been able to source. That’s important because it reveals where you may have blind spots or need to do further work.
Some brands try and do this assessment of the brand’s current reality in-house. The challenge here is that people involved and responsible will naturally want to downplay or explain away shortcomings because they believe it reflects on them.
The advantage of using an experienced third party to pull together this assessment is that they can probe failures and vulnerabilities to extract candid insights.
5. What’s really going on in the market and the culture?
Stepping back from the trading realities, it’s important to look at the broader trends affecting the sector. A market overview is an opportunity to examine not only what competitors are doing but also the impacts that everything from technology to attitudes to geopolitics are having on market dynamics. A cultural review is a chance to look at how attitudes and norms are changing for people culturally.
In particular, a brand strategy should be looking at emerging trends within sectors and within the broader culture to determine what the brand needs to consider, incorporate or avoid.
Right now, for example, sector conversations are dominated by AI, trading dynamics and availability.
The brand strategy should identify how known developments are likely to affect the trajectory of the brand in its current state. Influential and far-reaching changes could prompt a range of reactions – from redefining what the brand could stand for to potentially quitting a market altogether if the commercials no longer stack.
6. What are the strategic opportunities for the business?
Shortlisting a range of potential responses is a great way to ‘make the case’ for different ways to move forward, before deciding on a recommended opportunity. It enables those assessing the strategy to see what was discarded and why, and also how the recommended direction was arrived at.
Because strategy is as much about what you say “No” to as it is what you seek to progress with, opportunities are a transparent way to show pros and cons, to take what might have historically viable options off the table and to include and suggest ways forward that might otherwise come as a surprise.
7. What role could the brand play in the market?
Just as a brand can be many things to a business, it can also play a range of quite different roles in a sector. For example, your brand could be the leader or the challenger, the educator or the democratiser, the volume play or the luxury brand. A successful brand strategy defines such a role for the brand, knowing that role is the one where the brand can best gain advantage over competitors.
The role the brand plays should align directly with the brand’s chosen opportunity. For example, a brand that sees opportunity in expanding the overall size and value of a market could decide to play the role of a democratiser: a brand that goes out of its way to make the whole market more accessible than it has been.
8. What’s the potential payback for getting this right?
A successful brand strategy is a disciplined speculation. It defines what the brand sees as its best future based on the information currently available. To motivate decision-makers to commit, it’s critical to show what the business stands to gain in concrete terms. In other words, how does the brand strategy advance the wider business strategy?
There should be a direct contribution, and the goals used should align with those business goals and make sense to decision-makers.
We would also recommend that you include a list of current assumptions where possible. This provides context for the brand strategy direction and for the metrics set out as defining success.
9. What’s the DNA of the brand?
These are the elements that people often associate most closely with “brand strategy”. They bring the brand to life by defining what the brand intends to aim for, stand for and value in order to fulfil the market opportunity, play the role it intends and achieve the success that it envisages.
There are seven defining elements: purpose; vision; single organising idea; promise; values; personality and behaviours; and value proposition.
These elements help bring the brand to life through statements, intentions and characteristics that people identify with and that give the brand an attitude that it intends to make its own. Just as importantly, these identifying factors guide what people within the brand culture are asked to believe and deliver, and they influence the stories that the brand tells to socialise its presence.
A successful brand strategy forges a brand that people relate to, that they agree with and that they want to support. Naming, design and structure all take their cues from how the brand is defined through its DNA, adding further layers of relatability for shoppers to look for, value and respond to.
But brand definition requires discipline. Sometimes, the definitions of what a brand stands for just can be too complicated, too layered, with so many ideas and motifs that they feel more like a word salad than a clear description for the brand going forward.
But done well, a brand DNA provides insights and guidance that bring the brand to life as an asset and give brand leaders and managers something wonderful to work with and extrapolate from.
10. What are the things to keep watching?
No brand stands still – and even the best brand strategy won’t either. The key is to know what needs to stay constant and what to keep an eye on. If you’re strategising for an established brand that needs to change, establish a bedrock of things that can’t change, because doing so would make the brand unrecognisable. These are the brand codes.
Outside of that core, adaptive strategy is all about experimenting – advancing ideas to see if they work, capitalising on them when they do and letting them fail fast when they don’t.
To be successful, most brand strategies require an adaptive spirit. Too often, a brand strategy makes an appearance for the initial presentation and maybe acts a set-up for a campaign or design, and then is relegated to the background. But just as it’s important to identify and monitor how the brand performs, it makes sound business sense to analyse what’s happening in the immediate and wider market to change the brand’s environment. Listing a set of triggers at the end of a brand strategy provides a watch-list to keep the brand strategy relevant.
Further reading: The 11 elements to include in your brand strategy framework
Not everyone has to see all of this
It’s obvious from this scoping that there’s a lot of work needed to pull off a successful brand strategy. But not everyone needs to see all these workings. It’s about thoroughness, not complexity.
It’s ironical that we should be talking about how to increase the scope of a brand strategy, because major criticisms of brand strategy documents are that they are too long-winded, too vague, too indulgent, too complex and too hard to navigate.
No brand strategy is successful if decision makers don’t buy into it. And most of them will not give any strategy the attention it needs if they feel they have to wade through treacle to get to the salient points.
Which is why we recommend you structure presentations and playbacks in a range of ways for different stakeholders. Configure your presentation as you would for any audience. Draw from what you’ve worked through to tell them everything that matters for them in their role on a need-to-know basis. Then use question time to walk through how you arrived at specific conclusions.
Next steps after you have successfully agreed your brand strategy
To get started, you should set your brand’s strategic direction with these three decisions. This will give you a simple guideline for developing your brand strategy framework.
Once you have agreement on who you are as a brand, where you’re going and what you stand for at a business level, you’ll need to do three things.
Develop a name for your brand (if you’re not happy with the name you have).
Give your named brand a structure to sit within.
And outline the long story of your brand.
Finally, you’ll need to convert your brand strategy thinking into a creative brief for a design team. The role of that brief is to express the brand in a way that inspires people to capture the true spirit of the brand creatively.
Understanding why you need a brand strategy and what it should cover in order to be successful is the first step in making your business more resilient through its brands.
If you have any questions or if we can help you with preparing your brand strategy direction, please contact us.
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Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash