Brand strategy
Brand strategy is how your brand operates. It’s the reasoning behind absolutely everything your brand does. It’s why you answer the phone in a certain way. The reason you use the colours you use. It’s what you do differently, why you employ the people you employ. It’s the North Star that guides your company, and is behind every single decision.
What is brand strategy?
An effective brand strategy starts with a mission statement. Why are you doing what you’re doing? For us, it’s to rid the world of bad design and poor communication. Everything we do is in line with that mission, driving us closer to achieving it. Then you have your values.
The things that you constantly refer to when making business decisions. Your visual identity, tone of voice, and marketing strategy all come afterwards. They’re things you can only create once you’ve got a cohesive brand strategy that you’re going to stick to.
What are the key elements of a brand strategy?
In this toolkit, you can download an interactive and printable guide which covers all the elements included in a strong brand strategy. For now, we’ll go into the core parts of a brand strategy. If you’re thinking of developing your brand, becoming more consistent, or more visually cohesive, you should start by having a brand workshop with a branding agency, like ourselves.
Where do you start? Download the interactive Brand Strategy Toolkit to get a head start with your brand refresh or full rebrand.
Audience
Your target audience is one of the first things you need to get right. If you’re appealing to everyone, you’re appealing to no one. Before you think about getting a customer persona profile together, chuck your idea of demographics in the bin. Your audience isn’t going to be “25-40 year old women from London”. The variation in a segment like that is enormous. Instead, use psychographics. Their interests, what they like to do, the way they think. Because Tom Daley and My Grandma could both be the target market for a new magazine called “The Knitter”.
We run a brand workshop to help you discover your values, purpose, vision, mission, audiences and more.
Brand positioning
Your brand positioning is a crucial part of your brand strategy, and establishes your market position. Do you want to be perceived as cheap or expensive? Who is your target market and what kind of brands do they currently relate to or use? How much will your product or service cost compared to your competitors? Where are you going to be located if you have a physical element to your brand? What kind of brand messaging are you going to use? Your brand positioning will power things like your brand tone of voice, how you interact with your audience on your social channels, your communication strategies, etc.
Book a free brand review to get an expert view on where your brand could improve.
Values
Your company values should be referred to every single day. You shouldn’t make a business decision without referring to them. For Dawn, our company values are: Bold, simple, true and customer-focussed (this covers our customer’s customer, too). This isn’t just important for staying true to your brand and being able to make informed decisions. It’s important for your employer brand, too. 56% of US workers studied said they wouldn’t even consider working for a company that doesn’t share their values.
Harris Poll research commissioned by Google Cloud found that 82% of shoppers want a brand’s values to align with their own. Three-quarters of shoppers surveyed even said they had stopped choosing a certain brand if they experienced a conflict in values.
How do you figure out your brand’s core values? When doing brand workshops, we start with what key stakeholders really hate. That usually ends up with everyone realising what it is they really value.
Ready to get started with your brand refresh?
Mission Statement
What do you want to achieve? In a perfect world, what problem would be solved 100 years from now? Disney’s mission is: To create happiness for people of all ages, everywhere. It’s supposed to kind of be unachievable, like ours. We’re never going to fully rid the world of bad design and poor communication, but that’s our mission. It’s in everything we do.
Purpose and vision
Your brand purpose is similar to your mission. It’s why you do what you do. As a branding agency, we do what we do because we know the power of a great brand. Your vision statement should outline exactly where you want to be as a brand, in the future. It helps guide you, like your mission and values.
Visual identity
A strong brand identity has an identifiable visual element. This, ideally, is created by an agency partner or in-house designer who will be able to make design decisions based on your brand strategy. A creative team will take things like your purpose, vision, mission, values and brand positioning and create a visual identity to go alongside it. Do consider that the visual side, including things like your logo, your brand colour palette, and the way your website looks, are only the clothes the brand wears. Although these things will keep you recognisable to your audience, what’s really important is the deeper strategy behind all of that.
Looking to refresh your brand?
Want to talk Brand Strategy?
Services:
Caroline Hazard
Services:
Neil Richardson
Emma Parven
Services:
Jennifer Bailey
Services:
Andy Atkinson
Services:
Sonya Carassik Ratty
Services:
Joanna Pawlowicz
Don't just take our word for it
Who we work with
Brand,
Digital
& Motion
We believe every brand is a sleeping giant just waiting to be awoken. To rise up and show the world what it's made of. It's our job to chip away at the stone and realise its potential.
You need a website that does it all. That inspires and informs, builds confidence and trust. That enhances experiences and turns casual browsers into lifetime customers.
How your brand moves says things words can’t. Every movement either raises hairs or raises eyebrows. Delights or deters. It's important to make every movement count.