Brand Strategy: How to Create a Robust Strategy That Works for Your Business

2024-12-21

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Table of Contents

## Brand Strategy: How to Create a Robust Strategy That Works for Your Business

# What is a Brand Strategy and Why is it Needed

A company’s communication with its audience operates much like a dialogue between two individuals. Similarly, a brand can leverage its personality and emotions to forge a closer connection with users. The personality of a brand defines its values, makes it more appealing to consumers, and helps it stand out in the market.

We’ve prepared a concise guide on how to build a cohesive brand strategy and define your brand’s personality.

# Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

A brand strategy is more than just logos and corporate colors. It encompasses naming, design, and strategies that shape the brand’s image and adapt it to market conditions. It also describes how the brand is perceived by the target audience.

A strong brand strategy allows you to:

Differentiate from Competitors: In a saturated market, it’s challenging for brands to remain unique. A strategy helps analyze external communications, find the company’s “voice,” and ultimately become memorable to customers.
Strengthen Emotional Connection with the Audience: A brand strategy includes deep meanings and values established by the company’s founders. Regular and conscious communication with the target audience helps convey these values and build trustful relationships.
Increase Brand Value and Equity: Developing a strategy is essential to build a strong and successful brand with intangible assets. In today’s world, customers choose products based not only on quality but also on the emotions, associations, and perception of the brand. Often, brands are chosen precisely because of the overall impression they leave, and customers are willing to pay a premium for the habit and confidence a brand provides.
Optimize Internal Processes: A unified vision of where the brand is headed positively impacts team operations: employees clearly understand goals and efficiently allocate resources. Additionally, this strengthens the HR brand, as it’s more enjoyable to work for a company that clearly knows its goals and tasks.
Improve Financial Performance: Investing in the brand is an investment in the future. While it may not yield immediate revenue growth, over time, it leads to increased profits. Acquired recognition, trust, and brand loyalty gradually transform into sustainable sales.

Over time, even an effective strategy can become outdated and require updates to align with changing market conditions. For example, IKEA initially focused on mail-order catalog sales, affordable pricing, and simple furniture assembly, which helped maintain its leading market position. However, after conducting research, the company decided to place a greater emphasis on emotional connections with consumers, launching several eco-friendly initiatives and highlighting family values and home coziness in its advertising campaigns.

# What is Included in a Brand Strategy and What Types of Strategies Exist

Components of a Brand Strategy:

Brand Essence or Concept: This defining element forms the brand’s uniqueness, its core characteristics, and the tasks it solves. For example, IKEA inspires us to furnish our homes.
Target Audience: Understanding the target audience, including their needs, interests, and problems, is crucial for creating an effective strategy. For instance, IKEA targets families.
Communication Strategy: Defines the key communication channels with consumers and creates a visual brand image appealing to the target audience.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP): This isn’t just an advantage but what makes the brand special and indispensable compared to competitors. For example, IKEA offers a wide range of convenient and functional home furnishing products at prices low enough for more people to afford them.
Brand Benefits: A set of advantages that enhance consumer attachment to the brand, such as a well-developed loyalty system.
Brand Strategy Tools: Specific methods and mechanics for implementing the strategy in practice, such as influencer marketing campaigns.
Success Metrics: A system of indicators that show the effectiveness of the strategy.

# Principles for Developing an Effective Brand Strategy

Here are key points to focus on when developing your brand strategy:

Rely on Data and Analytics: Collecting data about users and deeply analyzing the market, competitors, and consumer preferences helps uncover insights that identify the most promising directions for brand development. For example, understanding which channels are most active for customers or which competitor features attract the audience.
Listen to Experts and Stakeholders: Include the opinions of marketing professionals in the brand strategy development process. Additionally, consider the views of company employees, partners, customers, and investors. Together, this can enrich the strategy with new ideas and valuable recommendations.
Test and Optimize the Strategy: Before the final launch, it’s essential to test positioning, visual perception, and pricing with a small group of users. Tests help identify the most effective solutions and adjust the strategy accordingly.
Look to the Long Term: Strive to formulate a strategy that anticipates market changes and shifts in customer needs. It’s important for the brand to flexibly adapt to new conditions and adjust its development course based on new trends and data.

# Stages of Developing a Brand Strategy

Developing a brand strategy includes:

Comprehensive Research: To build an effective strategy, thorough preparation of the informational base is needed. Specialists analyze the market, competitors, and target audience. They also conduct a comprehensive analysis of the product itself, including its niche, pricing strategy, competitive advantages, and customer demand.
Positioning Strategy Development: At this stage, the main idea, character, and philosophy of the brand are determined, along with the key consumer benefits. A plan for activities to build or improve the brand’s reputation is also developed here.
Communication Strategy Development: Based on information about the target audience, define suitable communication channels, the tone of messages, and possible user reactions to messages. Depending on the business’s characteristics, creative, marketing, media, and other communication strategy types are created.
Promotion Strategy Development: It should answer questions like how to make the product well-known, how to attract consumer attention, and how to secure strong market positions. This strategy is a step-by-step action plan for promoting the company, product, or service.
Creation of Unique Brand Attributes: At this stage, corporate style, packaging design, and non-visual aspects of communication with consumers are created: the tone of communication and brand character.

# Defining Brand Personality: 5 Steps

Brands often build positioning by combining several archetypes for a more complete and unique image. For example, Disney combines the Creator and Innocent archetypes.

Step 1: Analyze Your Audience

Users love companies that reflect archetypes close to theirs. Such companies embody characteristics and behaviors that help better understand customers’ desires.

Study your customers’ profiles and potential buyers. Create a customer journey map and customer segments. This will help understand what tasks they solve daily and what “ideal self” they strive for.

Step 2: Define Your Brand’s Role

Answer the question: what value do you bring to users? The role makes your brand unique and useful to people.

For example, if you produce bedroom furniture, your brand’s role might be to inspire and motivate people to care about healthy sleep.

Another example is Google’s role as “Providing people with the most current and reliable information.”

Step 3: Choose an Appropriate Archetype for Your Brand

An archetype answers the question of which consumer traits are reflected in the brand’s product. To do this, answer questions like:

Who is the brand’s audience, and what journey do they go through?
What does the audience want, and what can my brand provide them?
What characterizes my consumers?
How does my brand influence their lives?

There are 12 basic brand archetypes. Each promotes its significant values, meets specific audience needs, and shapes the brand’s positioning.

For instance, if you’re an online school targeting the “above-average” segment, you might align with the Sage archetype. It embodies intellect, provides benefits, and strives for development. This is a good teacher that people consult for advice. Brands with the “sage” archetype showcase expertise and rely on research in their communication. They share experience and convey reliability and confidence. The audience loves intellectual content, including subtle humor, interviews with scientists, and specialists.

Step 4: Choose an Additional Archetype

After defining the primary archetype, you can select a secondary one. It acts as a new character trait, complementing the main one and providing additional characteristics to your brand. For example, if your primary archetype behaves as a mentor and motivates achieving goals and overcoming obstacles, you can add emotionality and individuality in the secondary archetype.

Step 5: Translate Brand Personality into a Concise Description

The final step in defining brand character is to create brief definitions for each characteristic. They provide teams with a guide on how to translate personality attributes into communication and visual brand elements.

For example, if you’re a brand in online banking with key characteristics like modern, insightful, confident, and reliable, your brand personality descriptions might be:

Modern: I am sleek, minimalist, and innovative. I respond to the request to stay updated with new developments and implement the most promising ones.
Confident: I am bold, and market fluctuations do not intimidate me. This gives a sense of stability and predictability.
Reliable: I am a dependable companion on the journey to knowledge. I address the need to keep situations under control, adhere to schedules, and maintain discipline.

# Cheat Sheet for Developing a Brand Strategy

Always consider the desires and needs of your target audience.

Don’t assume you have no competitors. Study competitors, their strategies, audience acquisition methods, and communication. Identify your unique advantages and emphasize them.

A brand is more than just a corporate style or visual elements. It includes values and character that should be reflected and reinforced in every aspect of branding.

It’s crucial not only to build but also to effectively convey your image. Study which channels your audience uses to receive information and utilize these channels for communication.

Monitor brand recognition and perception. Regularly conduct brand recognition and perception assessments to understand how well the audience grasps the ideas underlying your brand.

# How to Assess Effectiveness

Metrics for evaluation depend on the goals you’ve set for yourself. For example, establishing the fastest pizza delivery brand in Yerevan.

Here are metrics you can track:

Changes in Brand Recognition Level: Through surveys and studies, determine how well the target audience recognizes and remembers the brand.
Consumer Loyalty Level: Use tools to track repeat purchases, loyalty programs, and customer feedback to assess their loyalty to the brand.
Increase in Sales Volume and Profit Growth: Analyze the company’s financial indicators, such as turnover and profitability, to track the brand strategy’s impact on economic results.
Marketing Research Results: Analyze research data that shows how consumers perceive the brand, its attributes, and positioning.
Collection and Analysis of Reviews and Ratings: Study customer, expert, and partner opinions through reviews, social media, and other platforms where feedback is shared.
Changes in Market Share and Company Positions: Assess changes in market share and improvement of the company’s market positions, indicating brand strategy success.

To understand if branding is working well, conduct audience research every six months. Ask questions like: “Do customers correctly understand your values? What do they love and dislike about the brand?”

# Trend Analysis

A brand strategy must consider current trends to remain flexible and align with market changes. Here’s what companies have been testing in recent years:

ESG Approach: Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) involvement in solving environmental, social, and governance issues. For example, test adding labels like “Cruelty-Free” if your cosmetics are eco-friendly. For customers, this could be a decisive factor in purchasing.
Artificial Intelligence: Companies actively implement AI analytics and automation to reduce routine workload for managers and respond more quickly to market demands.
Storytelling: Instead of “sale, buy now,” companies strive to tell stories that evoke emotional responses from the audience.
Personalization: Mass messages are less resonant with the audience; personalized offerings yield better results. Customize messages based on user behavior and interests. An example of this approach is Spotify’s recommendation algorithm, which suggests tracks based on user preferences.
Collaborations: Partner with other brands whose positioning is close to your potential customers. This allows you to reach a larger audience and attract new segments.
Influencer Marketing: Promote products through bloggers. Their audience shows high loyalty and responds better to recommendations.
Gamification: Incorporate game elements to increase engagement and stimulate purchasing activity. For example, offer to complete a user experience survey in exchange for a useful checklist.