Learn what brand strategy is, why it's useful, who it's for, and how you can use it to transform your business.
Brand strategy is the framework you’ll use to develop your brand in relation to your long-term business goals. It defines how, what, where, when, why and to whom you communicate your brand message.
Brand strategy takes place before any creative work begins and encompasses all aspects of a brand's communications, from packaging and promotional materials to social posts and articles.
Even non-tangibles, such as a brand's character, values, and emotions are considered during brand strategy.
Research plays a large role, too. With particular attention given to the needs, demands and emotions of customers, the market, its trends and the competitive environment.
A simple statement that sums up your core purpose, usually relatively emotional in tone and outlines a specific vision of what a better world will look like.
It should be for something, inclusive, service oriented, resilient to change, and idealistic.
Typically referred to as a positioning statement, this question aims to position your brand away, in customers’ minds, from what other brands offer while also enhancing what makes your brand unique.
The core beliefs and universal truths that are shared by your brand. The focus here isn’t only outward but also inward, which affects how the brand, its founders, directors and employees behave.
The answers here are usually descriptive, nuts and bolts, functional ‘doing’ and ‘process’ statements.
The core beliefs and universal truths that are shared by your brand. The focus here isn’t only outward but also inward, which affects how the brand, its founders, directors and employees behave.
Typically referred to as a brand's character or tone of voice, it’s how your brand expresses itself and communicates to the outside world.
Brand strategy allows you to clearly differentiate your product or service in any given market, providing you with a competitive advantage over the competition.
Brand strategy enables you to more effectively communicate with your target market by using a visual and verbal language they understand and connect with. This allows customers to recall more easily who you are and what you do, which builds trust and credibility when consistently repeated over time.
It also lets you more effectively shape your brand image. Or put differently, brand strategy enables you to define your brand in a way that your audience's definition of your brand aligns with your definition of your brand.
It can also help ground highly laudable missions, vision, value statements in the day-to-day of what your brand/organization/company stands for, making it more accessible to your target market.
Some brands even take those core beliefs that normally live inside internal documents—often never to be seen again—and bring them to the foreground, turning their beliefs into the basis of their brand’s entire communications strategies.
Anyone who has a brand, a business goal, and wants a plan in which they can achieve that goal.
If you sell products, brand strategy will clearly define what makes your product different—physical and emotionally—from competitors and give you clear insight into how to communicate both visually and verbally to your target market in a way they value.
The same is true for marketing services. When competing in a market where one service is difficult to distinguish from another, brand strategy looks for gaps in that market in which a distinction can be made—often done through positioning—allowing the service to be marketed as the only option available.
Ask simple questions. They should be short and to the point. The more complicated, the more likely they are to guide you off course.
By asking simple questions you'll be able to create a stronger, less convoluted, messaging and positioning statement that your audience is more likely to connect with.
The questions outlined above are a good place to start.
Positioning is what allows your brand to stand out, telling your audience what your brand stands for—the why you're here.
Your positioning is the space you'll occupy in the market once you've answered your why. Done right, and your why will have you occupying the gap in the market your audience was looking for.
No matter how great a brand looks, if its message isn't compelling, no one will stick around to figure out what makes it unique.
To create a compelling message, you need to know who your audience is. If someone from your audience were to come up and talk to you, what would you tell them? What would compel them to listen?
To create compelling messaging and positioning, you need to know what your audience and competition are doing. Look for openings in the market that position you away from the competition and closer to your audience.
5 strategies and 15 questions you can use to connect with your audience and grow your brand.
