Branding Basics Part 1 – The Brand Strategy Formulation Process

In the last post, I showed you how to create a Competitive Positioning Strategy for your business, now, in this post, you’ll learn how to communicate that via a Brand Strategy.

Here’s a step-by-step process for how to do that:

1. Brand summary
This first step is where you identify the brand’s/business’ core values. For example, your core values may include: honesty, integrity, excellent communication and client satisfaction. Serious consideration should be given to these values, as they become the cornerstone for developing your Brand Promise (see below).

2. Brand audit
This is an internal and external evaluation process to determine how prospects, customers and employees perceive your brand.

3. Develop your brand architecture
This is an evaluation of your brand’s features, plus its functional and emotional benefits, resulting in a singular idea of what your brand ‘means’. Brand architecture also defines your ‘value proposition’. There are three core types of value that a company can deliver: operational efficiency (the lowest price), product leadership (the best product), or customer intimacy (the best solution & service). This step will determine which one your company is best equipped to deliver.

4. Create your brand personality traits
Next you will select the personality traits you wish your brand to display to the market. Brand personality traits are conveyed in everything you do and create, including how your employees interact with prospects and customers.

5. Develop a Brand Promise
This is a clear, engaging, unique, and relevant statement which is aligned with your core, brand values. A brand promise states that if clients use your services, they are assured certain things will occur.

6. Write your brand story
This is a short paragraph about what/who your company is, how it got to where it is today and its vision for the future. As no company has the same story, this forms part of your USP or point of difference. It has an underlying theme which conveys your brand values, tells clients why they should care and importantly makes them feel something. This can be used in many ways (as a mission statement, in your company profile brochure or in the ‘about us’ section of your website). It also forms a starting point for creating your positioning statements and other key elements of marketing material.

7. Create brand positioning statements
Part one of this step is creating a one or two sentence statement that explains what you do, for whom you do it and how you uniquely solve a need. It gives clients a compelling reason to do business with you and will be found on many elements of your marketing collateral. The second part of this step is developing a tagline. The best taglines tell a story (e.g. American Express: Don’t leave home without it) or are aspirational (Nike: Just Do It) and if possible, also emphasize the brand name (Red Bull: Red Bull Gives You Wings).

8. Select brand visual requirements
This is where you match colors, typestyles and logo characteristics to visually reinforce your brand. If you already have a logo, match recommendations to the existing artwork to determine effectiveness, or create recommendations to define a new corporate logo.

9. Define brand operational requirements
This step ties all previous work together, by defining how you will deliver your brand promise through its daily operations. It is during this step that procedures and processes are designed to ensure the company delivers what it promises it will. (For example, to implement brand visual requirements of the previous step, you might like to develop a style guide to ensure consistent visual branding).

For the final part in this three part series, join me next week for what you DO with all the information and conclusions you’ve arrived at in your branding process.