You have a brand, whether you realise it or not. It may not be the brand you want, or even the one you thought you were – but it is a brand, nevertheless. It represents how you are understood by the market, buyers and your own people. To consciously change or build that understanding, you’ll need a brand strategy.
The power of a strong brand is that it’s how you are recognised, looked for, asked about, preferred, valued. But more than that, done properly, your brand strategy is how you bring your business strategy and decisions to life.
Your brand makes you visible. Even though it’s intangible. It’s what the market recognises if you’re well branded … and doesn’t, if you’re not. It brings you to life in their minds. Changing how people perceive you changes how they value you.
The point of a brand strategy is to identify and articulate an intended market position and future capable of generating forward value. The role of your brand strategy is to help you adjust how and where you present yourselves as a brand in the context of market choices, consumer expectations and competitor activity in order to achieve your longer-term value goals.
It provides a trajectory because it maps an intention.
Take your cues from the market
So what would prompt a company to create or review its brand strategy? It could be that you need to consolidate where you are. Maybe you need to change where you are positioned in a market because the bottom will fall out of that part of the market at some point. Perhaps you need to transform who you are in order to be more valuable.
Here are six examples:
- You are looking to change how the market perceives your company and/or what you offer in order to increase your shareholder and customer value.
- Your current brand trajectory is not working – and the brand itself feels like the vulnerability.
- You’ve lost presence in your market, either because others have swamped your visibility and/or your value chain have lost faith in you and are demoting you in terms of their priority ranking.
- You want to broaden your appeal by being associated with an idea that is bigger than what you make.
- You want to telegraph your relevance and desirability to the same or new consumer groups either to expand your offering or to make what you do sell feel more contemporary.
- You need to more clearly understand why you are innovating (to what purpose?) before you embark.
Your brand strategy is not something that you need to fully review often, because consistency is a key characteristic of brand effectiveness. But you should be making micro-changes as often as needed to ensure your brand is contributing as much as expected.
Marvellous is a metric
This is one of my favourite guides for market participation: Don’t enter a market unless you have something marvellous to say. And to keep saying.
Worth looking for. That’s what you become for your audiences when you have a strong brand strategy. Particularly in a context of rapidly changing sectors, marvellous keeps changing.
The key metrics here are margin, growth and loyalty. There are lots of others, but those are the three we most focus on: are you getting above-market margins for where you are positioning yourselves; is the brand growing at the rate needed to accomplish the business goals; are your customers loyal and continuing to buy from you specifically? All three point to your ability to be fascinating: to continuing to have something marvellous to offer and talk about.
A brand strategy alone is not enough of course
Brand building takes patience, investment and acumen. It involves synchronising different parts of the organisation to deliver with agreed focus. You still need all the other things to be a successful business of course: a robust business strategy; a committed and principled culture; a distinctive and desirable portfolio of products/services; experiences that people remember; sales channels that work; communications that cut through and tell the story of your brand in wonderful ways.
Your brand strategy sets the end goal for all that effort at a brand contribution level.
Two ways to approach this
Depending on how strong those elements are, you can build your strategy in one of two ways:
- Outside in – where you take your cues from the market and look for the best ways to align with projected needs and dynamics; or
- Inside-out – where you assess your core resources and competences and then strategise what you are capable of being as a brand.
We can help if you need a brand strategy
You can do this yourselves, if you think you have the objectivity and the time to marshall what’s needed. Or you can bring in a brand strategy team to help you get there. Done well, it’s not a quick process, but it is always a revealing one.
We have a big-change programme available if you want to go there, but we also offer rapid-resolution strategy sessions if you want to focus on a particular aspect, and focused consulting if you need a starting point. More on how we can help here.