top of page

What is brand strategy?

By definition, brand strategy is a long-term plan for the development of a successful brand in order to achieve specific goals. First, let's clear up the biggest misconception about brand strategy: Your brand is more than your logo, name or slogan — it’s the entire experience your prospects and customers have with your company, product or service. It's the stuff that feels intangible. Your brand is the feeling/image that a customer gets when introduced.   But it's that hard-to-pin-down feeling that separates powerhouse and mediocre brands from each other.

 

Your brand strategy defines what you stand for, a promise you make, and the personality you convey. And while it includes your logo, color palette and slogan, those are only creative elements that convey your brand. Instead, your brand lives in every day-to-day interaction you have with your market:

  • The images you convey

  • The messages you deliver on your website, proposals and campaigns

  • The way your employees interact with customers

  • A customer’s opinion of you versus your competition

Being an on-trend, relevant, inspiring, purposeful, innovative and community-centric brand – these are the things that will make people pause, listen and pay attention.  Customers want to identify with a brand they can grow with, that earns their trust and makes them feel valued.   People want to evolve with a brand whose products and services help give their business or life meaning and significance.  End to end, a brand must become a consumer’s best friend.

 

a brand is the complete expression of an entity (company, product, person, etc) that is being communicated creating an experience in the public, both rational and emotional.

This means that everything that interacts with the public creates the brand, so this includes:

  1. the visual appearance of the company (name, logo, colors, identity)

  2. the user experience of any product (interaction design, visual design, industrial design, packaging, ...)

  3. the interaction of any employee with the public, at any level of the hierarchy

  4. the customer support (speed, cordiality, efficacy, ...)

  5. the discussions generated in the media, both traditional and social

All these "points of contact" (and probably others I forgot) are able to create an experience and a rational and emotional response in the public, both users and non users. The best brand has all these elements aligned, cooperating to communicate a value. That happens at all the levels, and that's why "changing a brand" is really an operation involving the whole public identity (either of the company, person or product), with a really deep operation in change management, and not just a surface change. Still, a surface change could be the trigger to start this kind of change, because don't forget that the brand is something that influences also everyone working inside, not only the public.

Inquire for additional branding/rebranding information.

bottom of page