Why brand strategy has to be the at the heart of your business strategy
This may sound like a hot take, which I promised I wasn’t going to do when sharing my article series, but as you read on, you will hopefully see why it is not.
This is more about doing business strategy properly.
If you’ve ever been involved in a brand strategy project where the business strategy was out of bounds, or where the message from leadership was that the brand strategy project was just about the visual and verbal identity, I feel for you and the organisation.
See, brand in its simplest form is the organisation. It’s what your customers perceive you to be through their experiences with your presence, products, and service. It’s also the mindset of everyone in your organisation, present and future.
Intentionally or otherwise, every decision you make as an organisation shapes your brand. So, keeping your brand strategy limited to pictures and words does more than just tie one hand behind your back—it blindfolds most of your company from the playbook of what you are trying to achieve and how you are trying to achieve it.
At this point, I think it’s important to call out what constitutes brand strategy.
What is brand strategy?
The simple answer is: it’s the brand components of your overall strategy.
The elements that will ultimately influence:
Why you exist
Who your target audience is
What you offer them, how and where
And, how you want them to perceive you.
Let’s think about the remit of some of the key departments in your organisation for a moment:
Product, Merchandising & Operations: Develop and deliver a portfolio of products that meet your target customers’ needs while aligning with your brand ambition.
Sales & Customer Support: Engage with current and future customers in an intentional way to deliver your value proposition.
Systems: Develop and maintain a systems infrastructure that enables your organisation to deliver its strategic objectives, internally and for your customers.
Innovation: Identify new opportunities in relation to your strategy, brand, and target customer to deliver optimisation and/or growth.
Having the answers above doesn’t deliver an instruction manual to everyone in the organisation—and that’s a good thing. But what it does deliver is an understanding of what you are trying to achieve and how you plan to do it as a company.
I’ve seen the value of this come to life, both as a consultant and while running companies. It’s that moment where someone is faced with a challenge in implementing an action or task as directed. If they only have directions, they will escalate the issue and await instruction. But when they understand the overall strategy, they can make decisions in line with the strategy. It’s one of the most rewarding moments for a leader and their team when they leverage the strategy and make the right call. They feel empowered, you feel inspired, and the business strategy progresses in the right direction.
So where does brand strategy start, end, and intertwine with business strategy?
Cool, let’s get into the nitty gritty a bit here. And, let’s also recognise the realities of the real commercial world.
Every organisation is at a different point in time with it’s own set of unique challenges, opportunities and ambition. And, every organisation is different as it is made up of a different set of people with different capabilities and experience. As a result, every organisation has its own unique dynamics.
Every organisation is at a different point in time, with its own unique challenges, opportunities, and ambitions. Every organisation is different because it is made up of a different set of people with various capabilities and experiences. As a result, every organisation has its own unique dynamics.
These dynamics can make it a greater challenge to put brand strategy at the heart of your business strategy—but that really comes down to being clear on what brand strategy is. In my last article, The Great Paradox of Marketing, I highlighted the problems with bringing creative into the boardroom. While creative thinking is required to develop a brand strategy, it is the development of a number of decisions on what to do and what not to do.
Below is my base framework for developing an overall business strategy. This includes a colour-coded key to show where brand strategy plays a role. 😃
Overall business strategy framework
So what are all these consulting terms, and what’s brand got to do with them? Let's have a look.
Foundation: Purpose & Values
These are the true building blocks of an organisation and your brand and are often not given the attention they should receive based on the value they can create.
Your Purpose is why you exist. If everyone in your organisation knows why you exist, they can operate from this level. If you are not a ‘for-purpose’ or social impact organisation, you don’t need to fabricate a greater social good to have a purpose. You could be a fast-food chain with the purpose of ‘feeding hungry people on the go.’ No veggies or tofu needed.
Your Values are just as important. For many organisations, these are generic terms like ‘innovation’ and ‘integrity’ on a poster in the office kitchen—and that is a real wasted opportunity. Built and leveraged right, your values are a critical foundation for how you operate and how you hold each other accountable for how you operate.
When your team makes decisions and asks, “does this align with our purpose and values?”, your business and brand will be better off.
Brand strategy is defining your purpose and values.
Where to play & how to win: Vision & Strategic Plan
Developing Vision statements scares a lot of people. And that is because they have seen too many that aren’t built the right way. The ones with some esoteric statement, spanning a few sentences including “create shareholder value.” I don’t know who started this trend, but it’s just waffle that gets passed around for word-smithing for months until everyone is equally dissatisfied and moves on.
A real vision statement should clearly state where you plan to be as a company at a point in time (usually 3-5 years), underpinned by strategic objectives—the key metrics that will prove the statement correct.
Your Strategic Plan is easier to articulate. It’s what you plan to do to achieve your vision and tick off the key metrics.
At this point, you might be thinking: ‘Yeah, but what does brand strategy have to do with this?’ Good question. The answer is: “A great deal!”
Your brand is the vehicle by which you engage with customers. When developing a good strategic plan, you need to define where to play and how to win, and your brand is a key factor in this. If you are going after a new segment in a new market, you have to ask strategic questions such as: “Does our brand have permission to play here? If not now, can it in the future? Who is this target audience, and will our brand resonate with them?” These are all brand strategy questions.
Brand Positioning: Brand Character & Brand Promise
This is where non brand folk may argue that this detail can get shoved into the level below in the strategic plan with everything else. And the detail certainly can. But the easiest way for an organisation to position itself for a customer is to be aware of who you are trying to be for that customer.
In my decades of brand strategy, I’ve seen a number of different terms used for Brand Character, with agencies and consultants adding trademark symbols to the flashy new proprietary name they’ve spun up. But at the end of the day, brands need to adopt human characteristics to engage with humans so I simply refer to it as Brand Character. While it’s hard work to document and articulate your brand character, doing so allows everyone, from finance to marketing to adopt this in order to present as you plan to engage your target market. It also helps out when the boardroom does ponder over creative discussions.
Brand Promise, again, will have many fancy made-up variations, but it’s really what you promise to your customers and what you work hard to deliver on to keep them. Again, if your workforce knows what your brand promise is, they can work towards delivering it. If they don’t, who’s really to blame?
Brand positioning is a great metric to measure against when doing research. While you won’t frame the question directly and you won’t get answers back that match it verbatim, you’ll get a really good idea of how you are truly positioned in the mind of your target audience and what you may need to change to achieve it. It may be pricing, product, or distribution. It could be customer service. All things that impact your brand, business, and ability to achieve your strategic goals.
Market Orientation: Your Target Customers
Saving the best until last. This is the space where so many organisations lack focus, and as a result, hold back their true potential. The truth is, too many companies don’t really know who their Target Customers are!
As I’ve approached the subject of target customer definition with clients over the years, the top 4 answers I get are:
We know who our customers are, but we don’t have it documented.
We do have market segmentation and target customer personas, but they’re a bit out of date.
Our customers are ‘X’, which translates to every segment in the market.
That’s why you’re here to help.
Any of the top three are totally fine if they are followed by number four. But building a strategy to win with a customer you can’t define has a name: It’s called ‘spray and pray.’ And it’s the most expensive strategy of all. From brand to product and everything in between, if you don’t know who it’s for, then how do you make decisions? Usually, it lands in the hands of the HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinions).
So why do so many companies shy away from properly defining their target customers? Because it is hard work that takes considerable time and effort to establish and maintain. And what makes it worse is that you can never truly know them to the level you want.
But that’s not a reason to avoid knowing them as best as you can. And that’s the strategic approach companies can and should take: to know their target customers as well as possible.
Fortunately, these days, there are more practical methods that make this easier. For the right-sized company, a large qualitative and quantitative research piece is the best, especially if reviewed at the right frequency. But for many, there are other tools and methods that can get you far enough, quickly enough, and budget-friendly enough to elevate beyond ‘spray and pray.’ But that’s an article for another day.
If you’re facing challenges in developing a proper strategy with brand strategy built in, shoot me a message, email, or give me a call.
Cheers, Craig.
