Brand strategy is business strategy
Your most valuable business asset has less to do with logo or tagline than promises and expectations.
Brand in the sense that matters most is the sum of all the associations people have in relation to a business, a product or a service. It’s everything from basic awareness and reach, to understanding, meaning, and reputation. It’s the experience, sentiment as expressed in social media or product reviews, and how willing people are to recommend it. It can also of course refer to the marks, names and other elements that companies use to represent their products and seek legal protection for in a given marketplace.
The fact that brand is this complicated to describe is also what makes it challenging to measure, but I’ll save that for another post. The most important thing to remember is that you don’t own your brand- your customers do- so in thinking about a strategy for your brand, it helps to be clear about what it is and what shapes it.
Branding is anything a business does that can effect all those those factors in order to shape the brand. The obvious examples are marketing, advertising, logo, packaging, etc. but really starts with the market, the product strategy, pricing of the offering, how the offering is positioned relative to the competition, and how the product or service is delivered. All of those things work to shape the brand as it is exists in the minds of customers and stakeholders.
Brand strategy is the shared understanding within the business of who they serve and how they intend to earn the business and loyalty. Successful businesses with an established presence and loyal customer base can articulate their brand strategy fairly easily, whether or not they even use the word brand to describe it.
New businesses, product or service lines, or even established highly successful businesses often focus on branding in a superficial way that is decoupled from their business strategy, resulting in branding that doesn’t work as hard for the brand as it could.
A healthy way to check if you’re focusing on branding at the expense of brand strategy is to answer these basic questions about your business.
Who do we serve, and how do we serve them?
What are their challenges- what do they need, what do they value?
How does our business offering deliver against their most important needs?
What is the differentiated claim we are making?
Who (or what) do we compete with in our mission to serve this market?
How much do our offerings reflect a differentiated claim?
How well are we delivering on this promise?
If you don’t have good answers to these questions ready, they’re worth investing in and may very well unlock key strategic insights for your business; if you do have these answers, you’re well on you way. Marketing is not spamming people or trying to sell them things they don’t want, and brand strategy is not a packaging facelift.
Take the recent Burger King retro-rebrand: a comprehensive visual identity change with standout design work clearly evoking 1970’s design aesthetic, but in the agency case study there’s no mention of substantive changes to their product or customer experience, just corporate platitude:
Burger King is on a mission to transform its business, achieving the highest standards for food quality, sustainability and restaurant experiences in the QSR industry. It was time for their visual identity to reflect the rest of their business by creating a brand world that modern consumers could feel good about.
While an increased focus on quality ingredients in QSR is a trend dating back at least a decade, it’s commendable that this rebrand is attached to a claim, even if it is vague and relatively undifferentiated in the category. Let’s hope the commitment is real and the business will be able to deliver the brand experience their branding is trying to promise.
You can change your logo but you can’t change your brand- only your customers can- and the only way to influence that is by being intentional as possible about who your business exists to serve and how you intend to serve them. If you do that right and do it well, your customers will be the greatest beneficiaries, and satisfied loyal customers will do as much good for your brand as any attempts at branding.
