What is a brand strategy?
The brand strategy identifies and consolidates the personality of your business. It is a vertical imprint of its values and qualities. Far from being exhausted by its visual identity, a brand strategy helps you to differentiate and bring real added value to your business. The brand strategy is like a pilar for understanding the business yourself: once the answers to the above questions begin to appear, your business ads its human and emotional layers. A brand strategy is grounded in who you are, how you look, and what you do as an enterprise. All connected brand assets, from mission to chromatics, define the brand.
Why is a brand strategy necessary?
The way your brand communicates is decisive for whether your client’s experience will be positive or not. And the term ‘communication’ has an infinite range of meanings because everything – colors, tone of voice, and so on – is part of the brand. A brand strategy is necessary for taking the business to the next level, adding value, and setting out the business’s main lines of development.
Consistent brand strategies ad value for your services and products, and position you as a voice of authority. Most of all, the brand strategy fosters communities, which are brought together by shared values and causes. Their common ground is that they can relate to your brand’s story and vision.
What you should know before starting to work on your brand strategy
The brand strategy is usually conceived by a branding and rebranding agency, one that specializes in defining the target audience, analyzing the competition, setting the benchmarks, and creating names, logos, and other brand assets.
Implementing a brand strategy is like weaving the story of your company. That is why it is important to see it as a long-term process, not a one-time thing. You may even find it intimidating and uncomfortable at times, because it requires a lot of transparency and honesty. So be prepared!
Working on the brand strategy means defining your company and the team behind its operations. It is an honest and intimate process, so you should be prepared to answer complex questions about your vision and long-term mission
When do you need a brand strategy?
No matter the size of your company, or the notoriety of your product, the brand strategy is the link that connects your business to your story. It links your brand to a purpose, to a higher end. By definition, a brand strategy is required especially when you launch a new product.
To offer a new product in the market usually means to move into uncharted waters. People don’t know your product yet, so they don’t know what to expect. What should you do? Introduce yourself! This is when your brand strategy takes charge. Your brand presents itself, states its name, mission and vision.
Just like in a meeting, we don’t go over the top, talking too much about ourselves. We simply tell the other person what we can offer. A good brand strategy relies on discrete seduction. The naming, the tone of voice, the mission – these are all rounded off by the visual identity. We think visually, and images are worth more than ever. We value the stories that we can picture in our minds before actually reading them.
Aside from launching a new product, there are other relevant situations when having a clear brand strategy will help the business to prosper. For example, the product doesn’t reach its potential and it has to set a new target. Or the business grows slowly and with a small profit margin, which is unsatisfying. This usually means that the needs of the target audience fluctuate, or that some part of the brand story is not authentic and does not work out. But there could be some other reasons too:
- insufficient market penetration;
- unappealing, unpractical package;
- a new competitor in the market;
- the client is not attracted to the information your brand communicates.
In all the above cases, you need a rebranding strategy. If your brand strategy was developed years ago, it may be the case that the fundamental questions and rationales have changed in the meanwhile.
Maybe your purpose is different now, or maybe your mission and vision have changed. You need a new branding strategy to breathe new life into your brand and help it reach its full potential, and target new objectives.
When two companies merge
When two or more companies merge, it’s just like marriage: will you change your name or not, will you move in or your partner will, will you adjust to your partner’s routine, or will the other person do it? Some brands build a new identity altogether when they merge. They keep nothing from their previous separate identities. The logo, the visual identity, the tone of voice, the brand materials, all these are rebranded to correspond to the new business needs.
PR crisis
A PR crisis is difficult to get by. It causes a lot of unwanted noise, especially online. The energy around it is not exactly positive. But the buzz generated by PR crises makes us reconfigure our route, and maybe helps us avoid communication errors on our part. A healthy brand architecture will lead to developing and implementing a consistent branding strategy, that will accurately convey the business values.
The brand is no longer a reflection of the company’s values
Our vision changes. The way we perceive the world, our businesses and our goals, these change with age, as well as our ambitions and objectives. To be heard and understood by the right people, our story has to adapt and innovate, so that it truly mirrors the company values.
