Brand Strategy

What is a brand strategy?

A brand strategy can be hard to define but encompasses:

• What your brand stands for.
• What promises your brand makes to customers.
• What personality your brand conveys through its marketing.

As you can see, many of these things are intangible. How do you measure how successful you are at conveying a certain personality? How do you measure if you’ve successfully stood for what your brand represents, or if you could be doing it better?

The one main metric for successful brand strategy is brand sentiment. And just because it’s hard to measure, it doesn’t mean that you should dismiss it. It may not be as easy to quantify, but it’s too easy for analytical CEOs to dismiss the qualitative work involved in branding.

The designing of experience is a different part of your brain than the scaling of your experience. It’s a different skill set. The scaling experience is a highly analytical, operations-oriented, and technology-oriented problem. The designing of experience is a more intuition-based human, empathetic, end-to-end experience.

It seems almost trivial, but in a larger company, these two different skill sets would be handled by two entirely different teams that probably don’t often commingle, let alone agree on everything. That’s how you waste time, money and energy. In a small startup, you might be missing a “creative” angle altogether.

Define your brand and its objective

Your brand’s objective is simply its purpose. Knowing why your brand exists, what purpose it has in the world and what it stands for is what defines it from the very start.

The Value of Creating a Defined Brand Strategy

Branding is crucial for products and services sold in huge consumer markets. It’s also important in B2B because it helps you stand out from your competition. Your brand strategy brings your competitive positioning to life, and works to position you as a certain “something” in the mind of your prospects and customers.

Think about successful consumer brands like Disney, Tiffany or Starbucks. You probably know what each brand represents. Now imagine that you’re competing against one of these companies. If you want to capture significant market share, start with a strong brand strategy or you may not get far.

In your industry, there may or may not be a strong B2B brand. But when you put two companies up against each other, the one that represents something valuable will have an easier time reaching, engaging, closing and retaining customers.

Successful branding also creates “brand equity” – the amount of money that customers are willing to pay just because it’s your brand. In addition to generating revenue, brand equity makes your company itself more valuable over the long term.

If you have a brand strategy, make sure it’s as effective as possible

Poll your customers, employees and vendors by conducting a brand audit. Are their impressions consistent with your strategy? If not, work on the elements you can improve.

Develop your brand around emotional benefits

List the features and benefits of your product / service. A feature is an attribute – a color, a configuration; a benefit is what that feature does for the customer.

Determine which benefits are most important to each of your customer segments.

Identify which benefits are emotional – the most powerful brand strategies tap into emotions, even among business buyers.

Look at the emotional benefits and boil them down to one thing that your customers should think of when they think of you. That’s what your brand should represent.

When you want to define your brand, you’ll need to ask yourself some questions:

What problem does my brand solve?

Who is my ideal customer?

Who is my competition?

What does my brand make my customers feel?

Why do my customers trust me?

What is the story behind why my brand was created?

If my brand was a person, what would their personality be like?

Once you answer these questions, you can begin to choose things like logo colors and font, your motto or tagline and other marketing elements to communicate your brand’s overall story.