Brand Strategy

Brand Strategy is about creating a plan for the systematic development of your brand in alignment with your business strategy. Your brand should be a tool in order to achieve your goals and meet your aims, as well as helping to inform what those aims and goals could be. 

The brand strategy is the foundation for everything a brand communicates. It should be a clear outline on how to win the heart of your audience, beat the competition, and never have to compete on price. Our aim is to help you create this plan in order to take the stress and struggle out of your strategy.

How We Build a Strategy

We run brand strategy based on our six-step framework:

1. Vision, Mission and Goals

We will get to know more about you. Every business owner has an idea of what they imagine their business is or ought to be. However it can sometimes be a struggle to formalise that into a shareable and easy to understand format which can be communicated to your team, customers and partners. 

We will work together to help tease out what makes you unique; what your wider purpose and place in the market is. This will help us to gain insight into your long and short-term goals or even suggest some new ones to you.

2. Brand Personality

When we think of a person we know, we think of far more than just their outward appearance. We also think about their personality, their mannerisms and behaviour. It is the same with branding. For this reason it can be helpful to look at brands as people. Just like a person, a brand has invisible and intangible traits that make up the brand personality. Much more than a logo or a colour palette, we grow to know a brand for the way it sounds, the way it interacts with its users and how it conducts itself through customer service and marketing.

3. Target Audience and Research

In constructing an effective brand strategy, we need to focus on more than just the needs of the business itself. Whilst your goals are very important, they can never be reached without engaging your target audience and meeting their needs. We conduct research to identify key insights to create customer personas which are well informed rather than based in assumptions.

4. Gap Analysis

Once we have established how the brand wants to be perceived, the next step is to see if the customers are perceiving it that way already or not. We work to identify gaps between the perceived brand and unmet needs the business’ brand identity may have. By identifying these gaps we can work to create a strategy that will start to bridge them.

5. Positioning

Brand positioning refers to the space you occupy in the heart and mind of the customers. Once you know what sets your brand apart, it’s much easier to compete for this space effectively. You also want to make sure that the space you are occupying is the correct one and in line with the brand personality and perception we have established so far.

6. Recommendations and Roadmap

So far we have generated many insights and recommendations. The next step is to identify the next practical steps for action. We will create a strategy roadmap including recommended actions, advice on how to implement these, so you are left with a clear step by step guide on how to improve your brand.

The roadmap is the final deliverable once the strategic work is done. It functions as a written plan that summarises all the work done in the previous steps, the insights gathered as well as suggested action steps moving forward. It's a long-term plan of how to go from A to B, including the specific steps needed to achieve the goals and bridge the gaps. This is a summary of the most important findings, the golden nuggets that we have mined during the process. 

We conduct a number of workshops with you across the different steps of our brand strategy framework and will customise these workshops according to the availability of your key company stakeholders.

Implementing your Brand Strategy

Separately to, and following on from brand strategy, we can also help outwork many aspects of the implementation, including brand identity development, the creation of brand guidelines and a wide range of brand application across marketing materials and other collateral. There will be opportunity to discuss any requirements you might have once we are engaged with the brand strategy framework.