Brand Strategy
Develop a brand in order to achieve your business goals
What is a Brand Strategy?
A brand strategy is a plan for the systematic development of a brand in alignment with a business strategy.
It’s defined as a person’s perception of a product, service, experience, or organisation; a reputation.
Marty Neumeier
Franchise Development Brand Strategy
As a franchisor/franchisee you will need to build a culture that reflects your brand values. This will entail the alignment of your brand values with your business goals. In turn, this means aligning your brand strategy with your marketing strategy.
A branding strategy should be a fundamental element of your franchise development plan.
The key elements of a branding strategy offered to our clients are set out below.
A brand strategy is a long-term process which involves an investment and commitment to developing your brand. The strategy will help you defend your market share, protect your position, provide a competitive advantage and deter market entry by others. In other words, your brand acts as a barrier to market entry and aids customer retention. Development of the strategy involves: (1) knowing where your brand is currently and (2) how you want your brand is to be perceived in two, five or 10 years and how this might be achieved.
Your brand helps you understand who you are as a business and will act as a plan to help you communicate with your ideal buyer. This requires a significant contribution from marketing communications.
We’ll help you articulate why your business exists, what it stands for, your brand values and personality. In doing so, you will have a clear proposition that will encourage brand loyalty, attract new customers and become a platform for you to launch new products and services .
Situational Analysis
For the simple reason that a brand strategy is linked with marketing strategy. A complete understanding of your business and its objectives needs to be developed.
Accordingly, the strategic direction for any branding decisions must be underpinned by a comprehensive analysis of your business, the market, competition and the environment in which you operate.
Brand Core
Developing a vision, mission, purpose and values for your brand requires an understanding of the importance of the brand to your business and your expectations of the brand. Your need to clearly understand what you stand for and what your brand means to customers.
Brand Purpose
Your brands purpose is the reason your brand exists beyond making a profit. This relates to how your core product or service should behave.
Your goal should be to encourage and inspire potential clients to buy your product and service because they believe in you and your cause.
Research indicates that brands that have committed to a cause report: increased market share, higher sales, higher ROI, faster growth.
Therefore, understanding your purpose will answer the question what’s your brand’s ultimate reason for being?
Brand Vision and Mission
Your vision statement focuses on how you want the future to look. It sets out the long-term plans for your business.
Your brand mission statement defines your purpose and the effect your business will have on the environment going forward. It sets out what you do for others and your approach.
We’ll help you understand the why, what and how of your business. As your purpose is seen as your ‘why’, your vision is ‘what’ you want to achieve as a result of it. Your mission is your ‘how’ you are going to get there.
Brand Values
Your brand values guide your businesses behaviour and the actions of people you employ. Brand values help employees make the right decisions.
Your brand values are the enduring set of principles that define what your business stands for and are a key component of your core ideology.
Developing your brand values will help you influence how consumers view your brand. These are also an important consideration in brand value alignment with your target customer.
Brand Positioning Strategy
To understand your brand and how it is perceived by customers involves: (1) identifying the brands current positioning, (2) competitor positioning strategies (3) the way in which the market is likely to develop in terms of the product, brand and market life cycles, (4) customer perceptions, (5) customer expectations, (6) customer loyalty, (7) the financial, managerial and operational resources required to manage the brand.
Target Audience
Your target audience is the group of customers your business wants to serve.
We can provide you with an understanding of your customers interests, needs, passions and habits is critical to business success.
Market Research
Brand research assists in the creation of a strong and distinctive brand.
Our brand market research will aid your businesses competitive advantage through insight into product, service or customer service strategies.
Awareness Goals
Brand awareness is important when launching your products and services. It drives potential buyer decisions when differentiating your product and service from those of competitors.
We can help you with brand awareness research to measure the extent to which target audiences are familiar with your brand and its distinctive qualities. It also depends on what channels you use, for example, website, blogs, social media, email marketing, PR, direct mail, events, business cards.
Brand Essence
Brand essence is the core characteristic of your brand. It’s an intangible attribute that differentiates your brand from your competitors. It’s emotional and based on feelings. It brings together your vision, mission and values to determine what your business stands for.
Brand Personality
Your brands personality relates to the the fundamental traits that are attributed to your brand name, for example, caring, aspiring, courageous.
Developing a brand personality is important in relation to building relationships with customers.
Brand Voice
Your brand voice defines the tone of voice and how you want your business to sound to your target audience. It’s defined as your style of communication and needs to align to your brand values and personality, for example, caring, aspiring, courageous.
We can work with you to ensure your tone of voice feels familiar to your target audience.
Brand Messaging
Your brand messaging should refer to your underlying value proposition conveyed and language used in your content.
The content may relay to the functional or emotional benefits of your product or service to potential customers. Similarly, it may inform customers how you solve their problem and why they should choose you over the competition.
We can help you develop messaging pillars to act as a guide and ensure that all your marketing messages are aligned.
Each piece of content you create should reinforce these core messages across all communication channels.
Monitoring and Control
A brand’s success depends on successful integration with the elements of the marketing mix which relate to communicating the brands positioning and value.
The existence of a control process will identify where your business stands in relation to a future position. Progress towards your overall business objective can be observed, measured and redirected if any gaps appear in your actual and desired position.
Identifying the key success factors that reflect your businesses most important objectives will provide a basis for establishing appropriate performance measures, determining the allocation of resources and establishing a reward structure.
Brand monitoring and evaluation to guide strategic direction will consist of monitoring reputation, brand perception, brand sentiment and detection of online crisis.
Other Marketing Strategy Services Offered Include:
Any of the above strategies can be used in franchise development.
Everything we do is backed by research
A 2015 Nielsen Global New Product Innovation Survey reports that 59% of respondents prefer to buy products and services from brands they are familiar with.
Book A Free Consultancy Review
Take advantage of our free marketing review and we’ll give you the feedback you need to pursue your business aims and objectives.