Brand strategy promotes more than just your product/service, it also stands for your organization, company moral, and its personality.
A thorough branding strategy helps your organization discover meaningful ways to approach business with the following factors for consideration: competitive positioning, pricing model, website(s), sales material & tools, messaging, corporate identity, customer relationship management, trademarks, copyrights, and company holdings.
In the initial phases of your branding strategy, it is important to allow yourself some level of creative direction to position your company in the marketplace.
Here is why!
In order to capture market share, your target audience must be able to identify with your company. Consider the following such as your competitors marketing/advertising presentation, sales materials, messaging, corporate identity…etc.
You should ask yourself the following questions:
- How have they creatively positioned the brand?
- Are they visually demonstrating their capabilities and core competencies?
- Is there a visual meaning you can find within their corporate identity?
- What about the color scheme, how does it relate to color theory?
Step 1: Developing your brand with emotional impact
It is human nature that drives much of our decision making, especially when it comes to selecting a brand name. For example, Apple’s innovative approach with the release of the iPod, iPhone, and the iPad. They single handedly designed a unique selling proposition, and conveyed advertising messages that created an emotional impact and benefit. How many people do you know that get excited about Apple’s latest product innovation?
Kick Start Questions: Why would my target market purchase our product/services? What is the emotional response I want them to have upon purchase?
Step 2: Define Your Brand
Your brand should consider the qualities that can define an individual. Such qualities include but are not limited to the following: personality, voice, character. traits, and mannerism. It is important to outline a positioning statement that can be utilized in various mediums for your company. Select colors, fonts, and visual elements that match the personality of your brand. Finally, decide how your employees will interact with prospects or customers to convey the personality of your brand. Depending on the business, brand personalities can be conveyed with uniforms, dress code, code of conduct, and training.
Kick Start Question: What are the personal qualities of my brand and how can I best convey these qualities to my customer?
Step 3: Create Unique Marketing Messages
Use steps 1 and 2 to craft unique marketing messages for your brand. The focus should convey messages that not only create an emotional responses but also portray the more human-like qualities.
At this stage, it is important to write a brand stylization manual. Take the time to document the requirements of voice, tone, style, and vocabulary – such that the marketing messages are consistent. Consider providing a few examples for reference.
Marketing messages include but are not limited to your elevator pitch, market positioning statement, tag-line/slogan, mission statement, as well as various marketing materials.
Kick Start Question: What tone, voice, style, and vocabulary are best suited for presenting your brand?
Step 4: Sales Process
In order to stay in business, you need to have sales to ensure both stability and growth. This measure should be evaluated in greater depths, than what is addressed in this post. This step serves as an introduction for your potential sales process.
Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, consider how your customer will find your product/service. A sales process is defined as a series of steps that need to be followed from initial contact to the point of purchase.
This process maybe as simple as the following example:
1. Prospect responds to campaign and requests more information about your product/service
2. A sales rep calls the prospect and furthers the discussion
3. An in-person meeting is scheduled
4. Your team submits a proposal
5. Your prospect agrees to your bid and and signs the contract
Kick Start Questions: How does your prospect go about a purchase? How do you want the shopping experience to be for your prospect? What are the touch-points that the prospect will interact with? What is your sales process? How can you innovate or improve your sales process to maximize revenue?
Step 5: Corporate Identity & Visual Demonstration
Your corporate identity is an extension of your brand, in addition to your logo, business cards, envelopes, letterheads, mailing labels, email templates, fax covers, proposal templates, invoice/statements, memos, signage, and promotional items. You get the idea.
Each of the aforementioned is a touch-point with your core market and should be carefully developed to address the company’s personal qualities that are to be carried out through a centralized message.
Kick Start Question: How can you effectively design each medium to communicate with your market, while simultaneously building brand equity?
Building a brand strategy can take weeks, because it must be planned carefully placing creative strategies as a priority. Companies often hire design firms or advertising agencies because of the creative nature that is involved. Contact Creative Intellects should you be interested in a proposal from our firm. We would be happy to discover new and creative possibilities for your business.