Brand Strategy Sequence

Brad VanAuken The Blake ProjectDecember 11, 20122 min

Branding Strategy Insider helps marketing oriented leaders and professionals like you build strong brands. To that end we’re happy to answer your marketing questions. Today we hear from Pam, a brand manager in Cincinatti, Ohio who asks this on brand strategy… 

We have done a lot of consumer research recently to understand who our target is and what they see as key benefits for a brand we are about to launch. I need some help now pulling together my branding plan and getting internal buy in. Can you offer some brand strategy advice?

Thanks for your question Pam, we’re happy to help. Having carefully defined your target markets, done your research and determined the most important customer benefits puts you in a very good position. Now it is time to focus on the top one, or at most, two benefits that are highly important to your target customers and unique to your brand. They should be emotional, experiential or self-expressive benefits or even shared values with your customers. If you are still at the functional level with your brand’s benefits, you need to ladder up to an emotional and shared values level.

Once you arrive at this, then it is time to communicate it outwardly through your brand’s identity, including its name, logo, tagline and general look and feel. It is also time to create your brand’s story and communicate it consistently through a brand elevator speech (employees can articulate) and marketing communication. But, perhaps most importantly, it is time to make sure everything your brand does deliver’s on its promise. This can be done by deliberately and thoughtfully developing brand promise proof points at each point of customer contact and by creating new points of customer contact.

Finally, you will need to develop a plan that helps you focus your brand’s resources on the most important drivers of customer brand insistence – awareness, relevant differentiation, value, accessibility and emotional connection. The best way to get internal buy-in is through leadership team consensus-building workshops throughout the branding process and a carefully thought-through internal brand communication and education plan.

Thanks for your question Pam, we wish you much success in your brand building efforts.

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