A brand strategy is the basis for developing your dream brand. It’s a business need and the first step to take when launching your brand. Let’s think about how we go about vacationing:
You’ve made some big decisions about what flight to take and when to take it, the hotel’s booked and you’ve contacted a tour guide too!
These are all some informed decisions you’ve made to ensure smooth sailing. If you were to talk about the best approaches, you might’ve considered having your hotel close to famous tourist spots and scheduling your flight months beforehand.
This would make your traveling ‘strategy’ top-notch.
Similarly, behind every informed decision that a brand makes, a strategy supports it.
A brand strategy is a long-term plan that outlines the business specifics of a brand.
Encompassing core elements that define its identity in the market, it sets the brand up to achieve its goals. This strategy is inclusive of all decisions about marketing to customer experience.
In easier words, it’s an accumulation of thought-out decisions you’ve made to guarantee a trouble-free, successful business.
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Why is a Good Brand Strategy Imperative
You can’t get to the treasure without a guiding map.
Brand strategies aren’t just fancy words that you hear about. This planning is a foundation for businesses to build their brand equity. It makes the services or products more accessible to consumers by differentiating the brand in this saturated market.
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If a good brand strategy with strong core elements of consistent messaging and market positioning is followed, it retains customers and enhances repeat business. Plus, a recognized brand, trusted by customers can scale its prices to achieve high profit margins. Let’s look at it like this:
A hypothetical beauty brand started with $15 lip oils. In the years following its establishment, it achieved excellence in its market category and increased its prices to $40.
Due to its reputation and quality, this brand can achieve high profits against lesser-known brands. So even if the same–or even better–products are available through unpopular brands, they still come out at the top.
Brand Strategy vs Marketing Strategy
Both these business strategies are aimed at brand success. The differentiating factors here are their components and focus areas:
Brand Strategy
Purpose:
A foundational long-term plan to build an impactful brand identity.
Components:
Brand purpose, visual appeal, brand positioning, messaging, and overall consumer experience.
Focused On:
What the brand stands for, its perception, and its positioning to consumers.
Marketing Strategy
Purpose:
Tactics, strategies, and plans to promote brand services or products.
Components:
Budget allocation, marketing management, research, tactics, consumer behavior, and product management.
Focused On:
Approaching consumers through calculated initiatives for driving high sales. It’s focused on increasing revenue, quality lead generation, and market penetration.
Case Study: Tesla
Tesla is an American electric vehicle (EV) clean energy automotive company. Let’s have a look at its brand and marketing strategy.
Brand Strategy:
You can’t comprehend Tesla without acknowledging its purpose. It aims to transition vehicles towards sustainable energy as a viable alternative to gasoline, especially for its target audience of eco-conscious individuals.
It has signature colors of black and red picked out with the typeface ‘Gotham’ to enhance its visual identity. When we talk about its positioning strategy, Tesla has adopted aspirational and emotional values for its customers.
Marketing Strategy:
Tesla’s marketing strategy is aimed at generating immediate buzz and urgency around its vehicles and services. The company sustains a loyal customer base by maintaining an evident social media presence through influencer partnerships and engaging promotional content.
Its strategic endorsements with high-profile celebrities and teams, like LeBron James and the NFL, enhance brand credibility and visibility across all domains.
The Core Elements Behind a Brand Strategy
Now we’re done with step 1: understanding brand strategy, let’s move on to step 2: its elements.
1. Impactful Brand Purpose
Every brand exists for a predefined purpose. Every successful brand never skips out or rushes with defining purpose and following it through.
It’s vital to research what your brand stands for, apart from making a profit. This phase includes determining the principles and values it embodies. Like Dove, a leading women’s hygiene and care brand. Its brand’s mission statement is:
“We believe beauty should be a source of confidence and not anxiety. That’s why we are here to help women everywhere develop a positive relationship with the way they look, helping them raise their self-esteem and realize their full potential.”
It implements this statement into action by introducing campaigns actively focused on inclusivity in color, race and size. With its 2004 initiation of Dove’s self-esteem project, in 2020, Dove achieved the 60 million benchmark of educating young women to feel confident and happy in their skin.
2. Brand Positioning
It’s a big world circulating with chunks of repetitive ideas. Brand positioning equips a brand with a key characteristic to stand out. It is how it ‘positions’ itself in the minds of consumers through techniques like Unique Selling Propositions (USPs).
Elements of brand positioning:
- Audience: Understanding who your brand is built for.
- Market: Identifying the market category which your brand falls under.
- Aims: What the brand is set to achieve.
Apple’s Brand Positioning:
For example, Apple’s audience is tech-savvy individuals, the market is consumer electronics, and the aim is to deliver innovative products to facilitate modern lifestyle needs.
It creates products that are completely different from any other in the market. Apple is leading by example; none of the Apple products are devoid of creativity, functionality, and style.
Lastly, it encourages its users to market it for them, with a specific lifestyle tier now being associated with Apple users.
This is how you successfully position yourself in the market and make sure it remains in it.
3. Visual Appeal
It’s all about how creatively you can visually enhance your brand to attract customers and investors. The first thing you notice about a brand is its physical appearance. The more distinct and attractive the logo is, the easier it is to differentiate.
The color palettes and typography should be consistent and user-inclined to boost retention.
Let’s look at Apple again, which contributed to minimalist design. Its sleek product aesthetic and consistent color palette conveys the message of sophistication and high-end functionality.
4. Brand Messaging
Brand messaging is the underlying key message or proposition that a brand communicates to its target audience. It includes all specifics of the brand’s tone to relay forward to its platforms. Special slogans and messaging techniques can be used to affirm the brand’s value to consumers. Let’s delve a little further through its types:
Internal: The talk inside the company. It’s how you and your team view the brand. It helps promote transparency and trust, ensuring everyone is on the same page.
External: What the brand communicates to the public. It’s all the values and messages designed to reach the customers, partners, or media.
Components of Brand Messaging:
- The Main Message: It’s a short description, to sum up the brand’s mission. Like IKEA’s ‘Affordable design for everyone”. This one-liner conveys deep resonance and inclusivity successfully.
- The tagline: This is a short, catchy, and memorable statement that attracts customers. For example, KFC’s “It’s finger-lickin’ good!” (We’ve all fallen for that–one too many times).
- Value Propositioning: This is where you pitch the brand to consumers. This proposition is the determining factor in sales as it answers the question of “Why this brand?”. It’s essential to outline the benefits and features of every product thoroughly, especially the aspects that set them apart from competitors.
- Bridging narratives: This is the use of different narratives to build an emotional bond with the customer base. Used correctly, it can make the values of the brand memorable and relatable.
- Brand Voice: Think ‘Duolingo’, and how its playful and casual tone has helped user engagement. It was just a moment ago that YouTube shorts, TikTok, and Instagram were flooded with Duolingo accounts and their interactive content, garnering millions of views.
A brand voice reflects the brand’s personality and is elemental in maintaining an indelible individuality.
5. Experience
Brand experiences cover how products and propositions are conveyed to consumers. They focus on customer service initiatives and quality assurance strategies. Meaningful customer-brand interactions are essential to a brand’s integrity. Your brand must coincide with the brand archetype you want it to be associated with. Check out more about brand archetypes in our article here.
Develop Your Brand Strategy
Building your brand strategy requires a deep knowledge of certain variable factors. Here are some steps you can follow:
1. Research
All decisions for developing the strategy should be backed up with credible research and sources. Building your brand strategy demands specific analysis, such as:
2. Market Analysis
This involves analyzing the market’s dynamics, including its trends, challenges, and growth opportunities. Study the industry landscape to identify key players, understand their strategies, and uncover patterns that influence the market.
3. Competitor Analysis
Researching competitors is imperative in a brand strategy. This is exactly what leads you to maintain a differentiating position. Know your competitor’s strategies, branding, proposition statements, and strong and weak points.
4. Customer Analysis
Acknowledge customer insights, preferences, and feedback. You can use emotionally intelligent AI tools like Zonka Feedback to conduct surveys and gather data. This step should not be skipped as it can endanger the prospect of your strategy.
5. Trends
Setting trends and following them will help your brand in the long run. Your strategy should include well-researched societal and cultural trends to enrich relevancy in the market.
6. Define Your Audience
After researching your customers, now’s the time to define them. Your ‘target audience’ is the audience you’re entertaining. It’s who your brand is built on and for.
Gather segmented data
Segmentation helps isolate and manage the different attributing factors of your customers. Broadly, we can narrow it down to:
- Psychographic: This includes understanding the aspects, views, values, and demands of your audience. It stimulates an emotional association which further helps us build brand integrity.
- Demographic: Even if your brand is based locally, functional in only one city or two. The location of your audience can pose limitations. All demographics of each customer, including their age, income, education, area, and occupation, should be exhaustively researched and acquired.
7. Create User Personas
User personas are detailed profiles of your customers based on their information. Include details on their status, challenges, and goals, and initiate how your brand is their solution.
Brand Positioning
A key element in reaching your target audience, we already know what brand positioning is. But let’s go into detail about how to build it:
- Market category: Every brand falls under a specific category. Access your best match, its challenges, limitations, and trends.
- Conduct Competitor Research: See what top competitors are doing to achieve success. Conduct thorough research on their limitations to best bring a differentiating value to your brand.
- Carefully articulate your Value Proposition: Highlight what makes your brand unique. Even if your brand strategy is foolproof in all its aspects, if it doesn’t provide a new solution to the customer’s problem, it’s leaning to luck out eventually.
- Communicate benefits skillfully: Describe and market the key attributes of your brand that audiences will receive.
- Create a compelling statement: Write your propositioning statement by meshing these factors. It should be concise, to the point, and engaging.
- Test: Apply your statement, gather reviews, rinse, and repeat until your brand feels validated in its creation.
Voice and Tone
Would you listen to a condescending individual and voluntarily interact with them? The sane answer would be no. Similarly, a brand’s voice and tone define its engagement.
- Brand personality: Your brand personality is the traits that represent and convey its products. For example, Amazon’s brand personality is friendly, caring, and reliable.
- Create slogans and key messages: One-liner slogans and taglines as a meta description that embodies your brand’s values and principles.
- Set a tone and voice: Now it’s time to decide what works for you. It is generally recommended that brands have a user-friendly tone with different tones to tackle varying situations.
- Test: Implement your voice and tone over platforms to assess what the response is. If it’s positive, well done! Conversely, you can append to match user preferences and brand demand.
Improvement Strategies
It’s a changing world, with user expectations climbing higher daily. Based on insights from users and the market, be ready to adapt accordingly.
This can include anywhere from refreshing your messaging, redefining your target audience, or even reinventing the wheel completely.
Make AI your Best Friend:
Artificial intelligence is a great means of building your brand strategy and can be utilized in ways like:
- Predictive analysis
- Scaling your content
- Data Analysis
- Personalization
- Consistent strategy
Challenges in Building a Brand Strategy
1. Confused approach
If your brand has a poorly defined brand purpose, or if it has a solid brand purpose but poor execution, it can lead to inconsistent tone and messaging. This can prompt confusion and skepticism in customers or investors.
For example, Yahoo is now no more than an echo in the tech industry. It frequently struggled with the way it wanted to resent itself, somehow to achieve the goals of being a media company and a provider. In addition, its leadership changed quite frequently, which led to the previously set dynamics being changed.
2. Inadequate research
If your market research isn’t extensive, you will overlook distinguishing factors for your success. Similarly, if your customer preference research isn’t thorough, you can have the best marketing strategies yet still not get your desired result.
Just as the new Coke—a reformulated version of the original Coke—launched by Coca-Cola faced backlash because customers had built an emotional attachment to the original formula. It didn’t research its customer preferences, which eventually led to it reintroducing the ‘Coca-Cola Classic’.
3. Inconsistent branding
Your brand’s tone should not conflict with itself, whether through messaging, your logo, or your color palette. A good example is Airbnb, which maintains consistency over all platforms.
Looking at a real-world example, quick changes were made when Gap introduced its new logo back in 2010. This attempt to modernize the logo met with so much criticism that it had to shift back to its original.
4. Overly complex strategy
Don’t overdo it. Keep it simple.
Having an overcomplicated strategy endangers your brand by making it harder to communicate and implement, especially on varying platforms. Somewhere between one attribute and another, the message becomes diluted and prone to misalignment.
Take a look at JC Penny, which did not need to change its logo the number of times it did, nor its market tactics. Each time, by creating a ruckus about how to deliver their brand and complicating the existing brand strategy, it slowly loses its market relevance.
5. Inflexibility
You can’t expect a brand strategy from the 2010s to be parallel to today. Market conditions fluctuate, and the expectations are subject to change. Your brand strategy should be flexible in nature to avoid disconnected audiences and missed opportunities.
6. Lack of alignment
Different teams might have conflicting opinions regarding brand message and vision. These discrepancies create unnecessary confusion and inconsistent execution.
7. Limited or no Internal reinforcement
Brand representation is at stake If employees and brand representatives do not understand or support the brand strategy, like purchasing brand products. This can create a lack of consumer trust.
8. Static workforce
This is an environment where the organization or its employees are hesitant or even resistant to changing strategies.
9. Market fluctuations
The market changes slightly every passing day. However, sudden fluctuations in user preferences, volatility, and economic or political circumstances can disrupt your brand strategy. This may even call for its reshaping.
10. Technological advancements
Technologies like chatbots did not exist less than a decade ago. Businesses had to adapt and reshape their strategies to adopt these technologies. Similarly, the 2020s are seeing a height of emerging tech that completely changes how brands communicate and deliver products to their customers.
11. Trends and User Preference
The internet has instigated changes in cultural norms and values. Trends are changing quickly and impacting brand perception. User preferences (like eco-friendly products) are rapidly changing, which can pose a risk to brand strategy if not properly handled and addressed.
12. Regulatory changes
Depending on your market category, regulatory and legal changes affect your brand strategy and can call for its reassessment. It can affect how a brand operates and communicates.
13. Competition
If another brand beats you at the only value your brand provided, your ship has sailed. Increased pressure from competitors can disrupt your market positioning, pricing, and customer base.
Overcoming Key Challenges
Internal
- Encourage team collaboration: Host workshops and arrange open-ended discussions to aid team understanding and commitment to the brand’s vision.
- Communicate benefits systematically: Offer guidance and one-on-one sessions to help clear out any confusion in implementing the brand strategy. Educate employees about the brand values and key messages thoroughly.
- Consistency in channels: Ensure all platforms follow the same tone and voice. Your brand must not contradict itself, and you can guarantee it doesn’t by setting up verification processes to double-check the produced content.
- Pull from AI’s capabilities: Human resource-based AI tools like Workday and Sloneek can help bring uniformity to the brand’s organizational structure. AI can help automate employee tasks to help them focus on bringing value to the brand’s more significant components. This keeps processes resource-intensive and effective.
External
- Make timely adjustments according to changing market trends and circumstances. Configure a separate team to study historical patterns and charts and seek AI assistance in predictive analysis.
- Remain updated on the best-emerging technologies for positive user return rate and engagement.
- Study current societal and cultural trends and gain insight into changing user preferences through interactive messaging to adjust positioning and have the upper edge over competitors.
- Be consistent with regulatory and legal requirements. It’s wise to be wary, so you might want to set up a separate team to ensure the brand’s compliance.
Measuring Brand Success
1. Awareness
Brand awareness is about how many people talk about your products, tagline, or slogans. It is the extent of familiarity and recognition from consumers.
Surveys and Pools: Sending out surveys and hosting polls is an efficient way to measure brand awareness.
Like how Instagram’s app survey casually pops up asking for suggestions and your experience.
Social media: The brand’s follower count and engagement rates (likes, shares, etc.) can be used for measurement via social platforms.
Website Traffic: If you have a website, analyze the traffic and its type using tools like Google Analytics.
Companies like OpenAI and Shopify also measure their website traffic using Google Analytics.
2. Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty is the tendency of customers to repurchase from the brand. Its measurement is done by:
- Customer lifetime value: The difference between the profit generated by a customer and the cost of acquiring them.
- Net Promoter Score: Asks consumers how likely they are to recommend your product on a scale of 1-10.
Apple uses the NPS to gain customer satisfaction rates. Along with measuring revenue growth, this helps them strategically plan launches.
3. Engagement
Customer Engagement is the relationship between consumers and brands and their interaction. Consumers can use social media and other touchpoints to interact with the brand. Measuring engagement rates can be done by:
Churn rate: Churn rate measurement assesses when consumers stop engaging with your products or brand. Using this metric is essential.
Conversion rate: Measures visitors who performed the brand’s desired action, whether it be signing up for mail or buying a product, against the number of total visitors.
CSAT: The Customer Satisfaction Rate prompts users to rate their satisfaction with the brand on a scale of 1-10.
4. Brand Alignment
It’s the consistency across all platforms of a brand. Brand alignment is critical in increasing customer trust and brand integrity.
Feedback loops: Collect feedback on functional platforms to address any disparities promptly.
While shopping on Amazon, you might notice getting updates asking you to rate or review a product. This helps them analyze the brand selling the product and better their customer service.
Employee perception: Assess how clearly employees understand the brand value to maintain invariability.
5. Compare and contrast
A method to measure your competitor’s position.
SWOT analysis: Allows you to measure the competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
This method is widely used across the market, with Apple, Samsung, and Starbucks included.
The Influence of Market Trends
There’s a huge number of choices available for consumers online. With just a prompt and a tap, consumers have millions of choices to choose from.
Like the filters in e-commerce stores, users can get exactly what they want and when they want it.
Consumer behavior shapes market trends. Brands have no option but to comply with and deliver these trends. Brand strategies can be affected by these ever-evolving changes and demands, making it essential to adapt quickly.
Market trends challenge the relevance of brands, so keep a keen eye on customer insights and behaviors. Understand why consumers are shifting towards a particular service or feature.
Brands can do this by using digital platforms and tools like chatbots. Buffer and Mentionlytics are social media communication tools that smaller brands can use without taking a financial hit.
Observing competitor strategies helps identify market gaps and provide an understanding of what is being done, where, and why.
Ultimately, only brands that proactively respond to the trends and do not undermine the influence of market trends have set themselves up for success.
Evolve and Adapt
We evolve with time, translating to–forever.
Evolving and adapting doesn’t mean overcomplicating your brand and incorporating every single emerging technology and changing scenarios into its strategy.
It means wisely and strategically planning out your brand in a way that is researched to be profitable. Once, big names like MySpace and Nokia failed to innovate and adapt, leading to their decline.
Remember, think big, but remain humble. Knowing when to adapt is key:
1. Evolving Market
Consumer behavior can change, and brands must catch on quickly to remain relevant.
2. Lost emotional connection
If, somewhere along the way, your brand loses its emotional connection with customers, it’s about time it evolves. Customers who feel no bond with the brand lead to decreased sales.
3. Dated build
Do you really think Instagram would have been what it is today if it kept its original 2010 logo? We can’t fathom it! It’s expected to stand at 71 Billion US Dollars by the end of 2024.
4. Sales Decline
When your sales start declining, it’s helpful to have a resurgence plan chalked out. This, of course, includes changes to the branding.
5. Negative Brand Associations
Brands subjected to conflicts or negative connotations need to revitalize their brand. Regaining customer trust and rebuilding brand integrity is only possible through rebranding.
6. Lack of differentiation
When your brand value is no longer distinct, consumers have trouble differentiating it. Redefine your Unique Value Proposition.
7. Acquisitions or mergers
When you merge the organizational structures of the two brands, rebranding can be necessary to reflect the joint structure justly.
Rebranding
Before we jump into how to rebrand, let’s look at some fortunate—and unfortunate—examples of the practice.
Successful Rebranding in the Real World
Apple, one of the leading brands for all your tech needs, rebranded back in 1997 to tackle issues regarding its scope. Apple Inc. was limited to computers only, as its name “Apple Computer Company” suggested.
It has now expanded into technology from staple products like the iPad, iPhone, and iTunes. It successfully maintained its original values while scaling its product line to open newer horizons.
Unsuccessful Rebranding
Tropicana rebranded through its packaging, changing from the visually appealing straw in an orange to an abstract design.
This led to a decrease in sales when some customers even failed to recognize the product in stores while others lost interest in the packaging. A major takeaway from this example is to always listen to customer sentiment, and if it’s not broken, don’t fix it!
1. Evaluate the Extent
Know how much you should rebrand. For example, if your brand strategy lacks consistent messaging, you may want to address that concern and leave the rest as is.
Sometimes, there’s just no need to rebrand. Look at the rebranding of Twitter into X; it didn’t go as planned, and approximately $4 billion in brand value was lost.
2. Research
Start from scratch.
The rebrand is set at a different timeframe and in different market conditions so that the previous research can be used for guidance but not implementation. It’s wise to gather insights from customers and analyze competitors.
3. Redefine Values
Create fundamental values that will guide the rebranding. These values can be similar or similar to the previous brand, but ensure they align with the new brand’s goal and objectives.
4. Communicate Clearly
Let customers, employees, and the public know the reason behind your rebranding.
It helps steer clear of any confusion or conspiracies around the action. Having an open communication channel with customers helps maintain a loyal customer base as you shift toward the new model.
5. Introduce a New Look
Design a new logo and craft a catchy slogan! Your new brand should follow a consistent and appropriate color palette to keep things engaging. It’s a good practice to retain some elements of the previous branding for recognition.
6. Gain Feedback
Channel all available outlets for feedback loops. Gather immediate responses from stakeholders and team members. Act on this feedback wisely, keeping long-term benefits in mind.
You might even want to gain insights from your competitors.
7. Launch!
It is time to release your new brand! Keep the excitement at bay as you move into this phase. Implement the branding over all platforms consistently.
8. Closely Monitor and Evaluate
After the launch, start tracking your rebranding’s effects on business. Use key performance indicators like conversion and churn rates to collect customer data. You can then evaluate and respond accordingly.
The Takeaway
Hopefully, you can use this comprehensive guide to understand how to develop an effective brand strategy. Remember to understand your target audience and define core values with consistent messaging.
Keep the tone light and user-friendly, embracing AI and Machine learning. Your brand strategy is what will set you apart.
Don’t miss out on more posts that’ll help you take your brand to the next level. Check out our interesting brand archetype post to learn what they stand for and how to ensure your brand can be labeled as you planned.