Give your brand a soul and a competitive advantage for the future. Show your customers results and a gut feeling about your company. What reputation has your brand achieved? This all starts with brand strategy.
From A to B
How do you get from point A to point B? Brand strategy helps to define a brands meaning and how to accomplish future goals. Who is your brand for, and how do you win over competitors? These are some of the questions brand strategy answers along with a series of long-term achievements that will put your brand as the preference of your consumers.
Purpose, Mission, Vision & Goals
Why does the brand exist? Why should people care? What does the brand want to accomplish? How is the brand measuring success and what are the key performance indicators (KPIs)? What is the brands 1, 5 and 10 year goals? A successful brand strategy encompasses the brand's mission, its promises to its customers, and how these are communicated.
Branding is not a logo, a product, or even an impression. A brand is a customers gut feeling about a product, service or company. A brand is a reputation. Marketing is what you say about your business.
Brand Strategy is a Process
Brand strategy is not your logo, color palette, or even your website. While these creative elements are vital to successful branding, when your brand is guided by your purpose, vision, and positioning, your audience will believe in your purpose. Customers will respect your commitment and will want to associate themselves with your brand. Great brand strategy turns your audience into customers and then into life long fanatics.
Mission to Action
One of the goals of brand strategy is bridging the gap between how the brand wants to be perceived, to how the ideal customer perceives the brand. Starting with a purpose, mission statement, goals, target audience, and key performance indicators are crucial. Brand strategy is the foundation for a companies marketing, branding, purpose and design thinking.
Action and Prioritization
When your mission, vision, goals, customer’s pain points, research, positioning, messaging and positioning are all defined, then we move to visual identity. With the brand strategy in place, we can explore multiple design solutions. Pairing beautiful brand elements and messaging that moves with marketing strategy. With a direction thats approved, it’s refined over a series of creative reviews, then finalized for launch. Testing and evaluation to make sure your design identity is consistent with your brand strategy and hitting key performance indicators.
Define your brands mission, vision and goals. Why should people care about your brand? What adjectives would you use to describe your brand? What is the desired future state for the brand? Brand strategy helps define success. Is it profit? Retention? Growth? What are the 1, 3 and 10 year goals?
Target audience and research
Define your target audience and niche down. Then niche down again and then niche down some more. Some people want to reach everyone, when you talk to everyone you talk to no one. Define the primary , secondary, and tertiary audiences. Research can be used to make sure the audience you defined is the right target and find out how people feel about a brand. It can also identify unmet needs or wants.
Brand personality
If your brand were a person, what would their beliefs be? Their values? Their x-factor? How they think? What do feel? What do they say compared to what they actually do? All of these questions influence the messaging and ultimately how your fans will want to associate themselves with your brand. What collection of personality traits, attitudes and values does your brand showcases on a regular basis to help connect with a certain audience segment?
Gap analysis
A gap analysis assess the performance of a business to determine whether the business objectives are being met and, if not, what steps should be taken to meet them. Do customers perceive the brand the same way you want them to perceive your brand? Or is there a way to stand out from the crowd? A competitor analysis, positioning statement, or a way to reduce or eliminate competition are all ways to help the gap analysis.
Roadmap & Action
Brand strategy is about figuring out what your goal is and how to reach that goal. A roadmap summarizing of all of the things done so far can help bridge the gap. Using the insights and actionable goals as foundation for further actions is the springboard for the brand.
Brand Identity
After the brand strategy comes the brand identity. The collection of all messaging and visual elements such as color, design, and logo, that identify and distinguish the brand in consumers' minds. With a brand strategy and the personality comes a breathing experience that captures attention and doesn’t let go.
