Is Your Brand Strategy a Blank Page?
Brand strategy.
If you’ve been following my blog posts, you’ve heard this term in most of them.
I do not start on any client branding project until I have laid out the strategy. Why do I do this?
So often, we forget to keep things simple. It’s so easy to get caught up with making things bigger, better, louder that we forget why we’re doing it. But a clear brand strategy keeps us coming back to the soul of our brand.
By having a crystal-clear brand strategy in place, my clients are able to scale their business later on, even if it’s without my help. There are loads of articles on brand strategy out there, which is enough to tell you how big a deal brand strategy is.
So I’m unwrapping the jargon, and complexities of brand strategy to help you understand it better.
What is the purpose of your brand?
The inspiration for your business may have started off as an idea in your head, and it stayed there until you turned it into reality. But somewhere between balancing the books, and going through the product mock ups, you’re feeling a bit fuzzy about what you’re actually doing.
Go back to the drawing board, think back to the first time you cemented the idea in your head. I bet you can sum it up in one line—that pure intent of what you want this business to do. That’s your brand purpose. Write it down.
Now, who is the customer you’re doing this for? Write that down as well.
What change should this customer experience once they’ve experienced your brand? That’s the impact of your brand. Wrote that down too, I hope?
The motivation, belief and purpose of your brand is your ‘why’. It is the most important component. Start all your ideas with it. Talking about your ‘why’ may seem ego-centric to entrepreneurs who want to make the brand all about their consumers. Communicating your why taps into the part of the consumer’s brain that controls decision-making, trust and loyalty. Communicating why you exist sets you apart from your competitors, who are probably advertising what they do.
What is your brand’s position?
Brand positioning is the value addition that consumers associate with your brand.
You do it all the time with your purchases—you probably opt (and maybe even pay more) for a certain brand because they offer a feature that no one else does. There’s a reason people pay wayyyy more for a Casper mattress when there are cheaper mattresses out there. So if your customer had to choose between your brand and competing brands, why should they choose you? What does your brand do that makes it different from the rest?
How do you want your brand to grow?
In the initial stages of setting up a business, you’re excited, nervous and hopeful. If you’re a planner, you’ve got one-year business goals mapped out to a tee. If you’re someone who goes with the flow, you’re probably building the next steps of your business by assessing it at every milestone. While either approach may appeal to you, it would help if you thought of your business 5 to 10 years from now. Will your business have expanded into more products? How will these products function? Goals like these may give you sweaty palms and keep you awake at night but you don’t have to let them hang over your head all the time. Mapping out a timeline of business growth over 5-10 years helps you direct the business capital towards something substantial. A specific plan for year 3 may need you to generate a certain amount of revenue in years 1 and 2. It also makes you think of design scalability (and logo variations) early on.
Who benefits from your brand?
You’re solving a pain point for somebody out there, and while you may not know them personally, you need to know them well.
By this, I mean you need to sculpt an avatar of your ideal client. Here’s where you’ll need to delve into researcher mode. This may mean sending out surveys or talking to a lot of people because you need factual data, and not an idea that you drew up in your head. Find answers (with tangible evidence) to the following questions:
Who is your client?
Where do they live?
What are their demographics?
What do they do for fun?
What do they watch / read?
What are their goals?
What keeps them up at night?
From your research, you may find that your ideal client avatar can be split into smaller groups with a particular micro-interest.
In some cases, you are your own ideal client avatar. Some entrepreneurs make things they’d buy themselves if someone else made those products. And that’s okay too for starters. But if you want to grow your audience, talk to more people in your demographic to get a better idea of how else you can develop your product.
How do you want your brand to sound?
Once you know who your ideal client is, you can start thinking about brand personality. Brand personality refers to the human side of your brand. You know how you vibe with some people instantaneously and prefer to just avoid other people? It’s the same with brands, the personality of a brand attracts certain types of people. Your brand doesn’t have to be the most popular one in the room. It needs to appeal to your ideal customer avatars.
Brand personality helps with deciding on visual elements like colour palette, shapes in your logo, and tone of content.
The brand personality influences the brand voice. Remember the brash, unapologetic Dollar Shave Club ad that broke their website? They knew they were selling simple razors, and the language of the ad reflected just that.
If your brand is serious, and professional, that’s how the content on your website and any other marketing material should sound like. When it comes to your brand voice on social media, it’s tempting to want to sound witty to get more likes, and shares. But don’t tamper with your brand voice on any platform. Keep it consistent and true to the brand personality.
Once mapped out, brand strategy becomes your North Star in business. Whenever you have to make business decisions about which colour palette to choose, or which vendor to go with, your brand strategy will help you sift through the many factors and arrive at a clear answer.
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