Brand strategy is built on a platform of differentiation, where a company can use its value prop to create competitive advantages and satisfy customer needs. The key to long-term success is using brand strategy to define your market position in order to create market share and revenue growth.
A brand marketing strategy is a set of guidelines that help businesses determine their core values and what they want to achieve with the business. More importantly, it also helps outline how those values can be applied to the marketplace. For one brand strategy to be successful, it’s not enough to simply have a few bullet points of what you want to do.
To develop a great brand strategy today, you need both a thorough understanding of why you choose certain types of brand strategies and a detailed outline of what your strategies will be.
A brand marketing strategy is a set of guidelines that help businesses determine their core values and what they want to achieve with the business. More importantly, it also helps outline how those values can be applied to the marketplace. For one brand strategy to be successful, it’s not enough to simply have a few bullet points of what you want to do.
To develop a great brand strategy today, you need both a thorough understanding of why you choose certain types of brand strategies and a detailed outline of what your strategies will be.
Why?
Because the more detailed your brand strategy framework is, the easier it will be to succeed when you execute those strategies.
Knowing the detailed answers to each question will help determine what your goals should be, how you should approach your customers, and how you’ll measure your success in meeting your goals.
Why is branding important?
- Consumers who connect with a brand emotionally have a 306% higher lifetime value (LTV).
- Companies with poor branding end up having to pay 10% higher salaries.
- 90% of customers expect to have a similar brand experience across multiple channels, so make sure your branding spans all of the channels and platforms you have a presence on.
- 84% of marketers say brand awareness is the most important goal.
- Branded content is 22 times more engaging than your standard display ad.
“Emotionally connected customers have a 306% higher lifetime value (LTV) for your brand.”
How to develop a brand strategy?
A brand development 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?
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The one main metric for successful new brand development 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.
As Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky made so clear: “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 of an 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 smaller company, you’re often missing a “creative” team altogether. Brian knows how to build a brand because he understands the real levers at play here.
For example, when my agency helped the Shark Tank company, Plated, scale to $100M in revenue in just 18 months, and then exit, you have to understand they had a team of 15 marketers who were struggling with customer acquisition(!), despite having a beautiful brand and a perfectly functioning website and funnels. So, I really appreciated the founders Nick and Josh saying something along the lines of, “We are the least creative guys in the room … so if you guys say this is what we should do, then let’s do it.” Great! That’s why you hire experts on the matter, and it’s ok to take a back seat, to a degree, if you don’t have a strong understanding or opinion on the direction.
It’s amazing how many funded startups are in a rush to build their marketing team. The story above should help you realize that there is much to resolve before doing that — otherwise you’ll be burning cash at a higher rate than needed.
Does this resonate? Some see branding as fluffy, touchy-feely emotional stuff and that’s why they often fail with branding. First, that’s a superficial way to approach it. Branding is critical to your brand’s existence! It also feeds your entire team’s culture.