Building your Brand Strategy
July 26, 2023
Building a Brand with a Brand Development Strategy
Your brand is undoubtedly the most important asset for long-term growth. To complement our brand evaluation system ‘BrandVision’ we have created this Brand Building Guide. BrandVision provides the essential link between your brand strategy and the customer.
5 Steps to a Succesful Brand Strategy
Brand development involves the process of creating and fortifying your brand. To facilitate companies on this journey, we break down the process into 5 key steps.
- Step 1 is the initial phase and revolves around aligning your brand strategy with your business objectives, ensuring it is on point.
- Steps 2 and 3 are designed to understand your customer and make sure your targeting is razor sharp.
- Step 4 is where you’ll be crafting or refining all the essential tools to effectively communicate your brand.
- Step 5 is the phase of strengthening the newly developed or updated brand to establish its solid presence in the market.
To accomplish these tasks, you’ll require a well-thought-out brand development strategy.
Step 1 – Consider Your Business Strategy
Your brand can be seen as a reflection of your brand reputation and how prominently it stands out in the marketplace.
We quantify the strength of your brand as a product of Reputation x Visibility. There are many ways of evaluating reputation and our highly regarded Brand Equity Wheel provides a wide array of metrics to help inform and build your strategy.
A strong, well-differentiated brand will make growing your brand much easier. But what type of brand do you want? Are you planning to grow organically?
Your overall business strategy and goals must be at the heart of your brand development strategy, so that’s the place to start. If you are clear about where you want to take your business, your brand and brand strategy will help you get there.
Vision One’s Brand Equity Wheel is a great source of inspiration and metrics to help build your brand.
Step 2 – Identify your target customers
One of the most important but underrated aspect of building a brand strategy is the target audience – this is because it’s our natural tendency to want to capture as many customers as possible. Who are your target clients? If your answer is “everyone”, this will often lead to disappointment.
Extensive research we have conducted shows that the most successful brands are focused on having clearly defined target clients. The narrower your focus, the faster your growth. The more diverse the target audience, the more diluted your marketing efforts will be. Research can help identify your target market and within that, the segments that deserve the most focus.
Step 3 – Research your Customer
Brands that conduct systematic and regular research on their target audience grow faster and are more profitable (than those that don’t). Furthermore, those that do research more frequently grow faster still.
Research helps you understand your target market’s perspective and priorities, anticipate their needs and put your message in language that resonates with them. It also tells you how they view your strengths and your current brand offering. As such, it dramatically lowers the marketing risk associated with brand, marketing and product development.
One of the main reasons for this is that the most successful brands and marketing tend to also be ‘Relevant’. Brand Relevance is the most powerful metric in predicting brand and business success and a key facet of Brand Love. Regular research ensures all your brand components are and remain consistently relevant in an ever-changing world.
Step 4 – Your Proposition, Brand Promise & Messaging
Most brands, products and services are actually very similar, so it is essential for brands to differentiate themselves from their competitors, by demonstrating why customers should choose you. There are many ways to differentiate but ultimately it will be important to own something appealing (rational or emotional) that others will struggle to emulate.
A positioning statement is typically three to five sentences in length and captures the essence of your brand positioning. It must be grounded, as you will have to deliver on what you promise. It must also be a bit aspirational and forward-looking so you have something to strive for.
Your messaging must resonate with your target audience and convey the right image and values that matter to them. Many of our clients integrate brand and communications into their brand development studies. This can mean evaluating many elements such as logo, brand name, strapline, packaging, tv and radio advertising, web pages, sales materials, new product concepts etc.
Step 5 – Implement, Track and Adjust
This final step in the brand development process is arguably the most important. A brand strategy is pointless if it is never implemented or if the marketing isn’t achieving its strategic goals. Actually delivering a good strategy is tough – it requires determined focus and well-informed decisions.
That’s why brand tracking is so important. We strongly recommend tracking both the implementation of the plan as well as results. Did the strategy get implemented as planned? What happened with the objective measures, such as brand awareness, increasing brand momentum or strengthening brand love or brand image? Only by tracking the entire process can you make sure you are drawing the right conclusions and making the right adjustments.
Claim a Brand Strategy Consultation Today
We are offering a free brand strategy audit for a limited time only.
This audit will require about 10 to 15 minutes of your time to tell us about your brand by completing a questionnaire. Once you have submitted your input we will go away and evaluate your inputs and come back with recommendations for your brand strategy and how to achieve and monitor it going forward.
How Focus Groups can inform your Brand Development Strategy
There are many areas where qualitative workshops and focus groups can also help brand owners understand their brand, competitors and build their brand strategy
Brand Archetypes
Check out our Brand Archetype Quiz to get a better understanding of your brand. Focus groups help finesse this even further.
Brand Positioning
Most marketers believe that Brand Positioning is probably the most important facet of your brand. Understanding where your brand is positioned vs your competitors can be difficult but groups can often be the best approach.
Competitor Evaluation
It is often difficult for brand owners to develop an objective understanding of the competitors and research is great for unravelling their weaknesses and the opportunities for you.
