Brand Development Strategy and Implementation for your Small to Midmarket Company             

Your brand could and should be your company’s strongest and most recognisable asset, both at functional fit and psychographic attachment basis. It pays to focus on this and ensure that all that your business does enhances, protects and defends your brand.

This means it is a business imperative for all competitively focused businesses to build, strengthen and establish resonant and powerful brands. Let’s discuss how.

A quick note on Brand vs Branding

Brand differs from branding, in that while branding represents your visual identity and recognisable visible cues, marks and straplines, your brand represents an idea and story founded in the needs of your target segment and the messages in your story that position your brand as the offering that meets those needs the best. Note, your offering need not be the best in its class by features or function. Your target segment just need to perceive it as the best fit for their stated and unstated needs  and benefits versus rivals in your market.

This means they buy into your story and you become part of theirs when, they take you up on your promise and are as such, your brand reputation and reliability become of import, especially long term. These people become your tribe, to whom the relevance, authority, reliability and efficacy of your brand lead them to laud and promote your brand and its offerings. Any failure of reputation or inadequacies or inauthenticities impact upon your brand power. This is a long term proposition but a necessary one.

Brand Strategy Definition – the end of uncertainty

Brand Strategy Definition – the Creating and having a brand strategy with Iconify, consists of defining and articulating your brand purpose, principles, positioning, proposition and promise in an integrated and powerful way that enables the development and crafting of compelling communications that can be used to interact with your customers throughout the customer lifecycle. We are geared up to provide holistic creative consulting services that ensure that we can assist with any potential requirements or blockers to building a strong brand. This means that when we work with you, we are intent on developing an effective long term strategy, inseparable from well thought out and mapped customer experience, This is a primary differentiator of our approach and efficacy. Therefore, you will really know ‘who’ your brand is, ‘what’ it is and is not and what gives it the right to exist. You will know who needs and loves you and have a clear view of who you should be focusing on to the exclusion of other groups.

The Process: This a multi-step approach that uncovers the brand pyramid, purpose and the who, what, where of your business in a competitive mapscape.

Brand Strategy Underliers: We run discovery and deep dive workshops to understand your business and its goals, your people and stakeholders, as a precursor or in parallel to the research we will be doing on your industry, competitors and opportunities.

• Brand Strategy Enablers: People and Team structures, workflows and information flows that would affect your promise or proposition delivery. Your organisation’s decision makers may choose to address this at a later period, but we provide a high level risk register of what to look out for and focus on in any business change exercise.
• Brand Strategy Components and Maintenance Framework: We consider how your current state business model and where gaps, issues, risks and opportunities lie to make improvements in people, practices, policies and organisation wide tools that would impact on the strength of the brand strategy implementation.
• Branding Collateral:  The foundational part of creating a brand, as outlined above drives everything. Once that is complete, we help you prepare the collateral to underpin the image decided on through the previous phase, and consider how that is translated into your visual identity using branding rules. Brand collateral is the development of the brand assets that comprise your visual and verbal branding designs, marks and music, and as part of this stage, we can help with naming or renaming, logos, straplines, colourways and signature tunes.
• Logos: Using creative and methods, we brainstorm with your decision makers and marketers on the ideation for your company logo and other marks for different channels usage.
• Design: With the brand truths documented, we work with our graphic designers to build out the brand look and feel of your business or products and services. This will be a prerequisite for creating your website, social media and other communications.
• Rules: We provide in depth planning and consultancy of the rules of naming, logos, and brand design and positioning including colour and shape cues most appropriate to your brand, and your tribe.

Brand Strategy Implementation

Once we have agreed with you what the brand is and what it stands for in its market, how it competes and is positioned, we set about working with you to implement the actions needed to establish, entrench and project the brand.

Our broad process for doing this is outlined in our Step by Step Guide to Brand Strategy Development and Implementation but it is worth noting, to conclude this piece, that once clarity exists on the brand positioning, principles Brand Resonance Factors,

Brand Communications is a critical part of any implementation.

• Brand Communications: Digital Communications and Marketing are absolutely key to the brand communications process as are developing strong brand aligning messaging appropriate to all digital marketing. Understanding of the customer experience journey and a strategy for customer engagement are critical to how well these steps can unfold. This is an important task and requires testing across all the channels to iterate and tweak for each segment we plan to engage with. It should be evident that effective brand strategy is dependent on exploiting the capabilities of the mixed capability creative consulting services that we provide.

Step by Step Guide to Brand Strategy Implementation

We have a strategy and plan. What now? We execute, within a tight and tracked project management structure. The steps will differ depending on the business type, challenge and stage in the lifecycle, but will broadly follow the following process.

1.Create or revisit the brand architecture

Building a brand pyramid helps to discover purpose and values for the brand and ascribe a personality, voice and emotional aspirations to your brand. This exercise allows feedback from stakeholders within the organisation to provide a check to outputs gleaned and a method to gain consistency during discovery workshops.

2.Define and refine differentiation and proposition

Undifferentiated positioning is equal to trading as a commodity, in the absence of a monopoly. Understanding business objectives and then taking the steps necessary to differentiate your offering and find a position to lead in and fleshing out the business plans and operating models to achieve this.

3.Research

Core research on your area, competitors, industry and consumer profiles to map key offering features to positioning objectives and underserved needs and isolate viable segments to target as closely and tightly as possible to enable customer capture and growth. How will your differentiators play to these people?

4.Discovery and Current State Analysis where applicable

We begin the process of aligning your brand strategy to your business strategy by deep diving into your organisation and its workings. This also allows research and validation of stated values and purpose.

5.Workshop the relevant candidate target segments

Using primary and secondary methods, we investigate further the motivations, fears and desires, pain points and possible gains and other psychographic elements within audiences and finding overlaps that can be exploited. We explore data held on current customers, if yours is a pre-existing business to build stronger profiles of consumers.

6. Determining and your tribe and the various target segments

There comes a time when all the research is in, the interviews are complete and the picture is clear as to whether your brand has a tribe and the different demographic profiles that make them. From now on, everything will be driven by these profiles, the needs, wants, fears, preferences and data on the hangouts and habits of these people.

7. Determine Market Position – for the offering and for the brand

Linked to differentiation and the by now tightly defined customer profiles, based on what we know about the market, how you are different and who your tribes are, work can begin to delineate a credible, ownable position, one that your brand can lead in. We help you apply positioning rules and avoid wasted time, effort and money promoting ‘better features’ and work through a positioning statement until it is right, ambitious but deliverable, honest but based on benefits and payoffs of adoption of your business offering.

8. Brand Communications

The pivotal dimension to brand strategy implementation is brand communications. From the channels that will be used to the messages that will be disseminated via the channels and the strategy for engagement with the target segments that constitute your tribe – to educate them, inform them, involve them and ultimately delight them.

• Messaging

We start with story –the story that everything your brand will ever do or say or imply will hark back to, anchored to your purpose, values. This is the overarching construct that references the brand architecture – brand personality, voice and proposition. The proposition encapsulates the offering from a benefits context and is not (exclusively) features based, and storytelling is an important delivery vehicle.

Messages will then be painstakingly crafted that will appeal to your target segment in a language and even lingo, they will not only understand, but appreciate and that will move them to take action. We never forget that the purpose of messaging is also to attract and convert those who are not already in your tribe.

People in your tribe are like children; parents will tell you they are all different. While you may be fundamentally yourself and teach them all the same values and with fairness, to get the best out of each, you must approach and deal with each with variations. So it is with communicating with the segments in your tribe. You messaging must show awareness of and familiarity with the differences in their mindsets, interests and world views to be relevant and authentic as it reaches them.

• Digital and content marketing

In ‘Brand Strategy and the Case for Digital Marketing’, we outline the importance of Digital Marketing to implementing Brand Strategy. Digital Marketing has done more Brand Strategy than any other advances in the past decade and a half but the strategy for use must be smart, extensive and well managed along aligned brand communications and risk strategies. Opportunities to meet, engage with and inspire your audience is far more than ever before and consequently, digital represents a huge opportunity in strategy implementation.

Your content is anchored directly to the story and communications strategy, and in the service of reputation and resonance must be vetted and must validate customer’s expectations, even anticipate them.

Why do all this, in any case? Growth and brand equity of course, and good communications as a long term strategy will ensure that this is an attainable and sustainable goal.

• Website Design and Development leveraging the power of great Brand Communications

Your website anchors your image and your message and once developed your brand identity too. It’s a crucial source of information and should form part of your brand extension strategy. Content should following your brand’s Communications guidelines set and should adhere to your brand’s voice. It’s another channel through which you tell your prospects what you are about but it’s an important one, within your control because it is owned media.

Per your brand communications and content strategy, your website should be the repository for the data you want to share, to use to inspire and educate and begin to build influence, through the use of blogs by your leaders and staff, to share useful information with prospects and clients alike. With the relevant SEO, your website can also drive your prospecting and very importantly help you acquire valuable prospects and behavioural data.

9. Internal brand engagement

Precious People. It’s one of our catchphrases here at Iconify, and a real thing for us. We like to think that people are top of mind for of our efforts. But there are precious people on both sides. Sure, you customers generate revenue and help build visibility but so do your staff. It is every bit as important to engage your staff as your front line clients, train, equip and empower them to help propel your brand’s message, visibility and reputation. They must be on side and on message and we can help with your brand engagement and to develop a people operating model to ensure you have brand whisperers inside of, as well as outside your business.

10. Brand Risk Management

All of the above is to say that as we build your brand and implement your strategy, but mostly beyond, significant Brand Risks exist and we run some exercises as part of implementation to ensure that there is a framework for outlining the risks your brand faces through its delivery process, especially on the Customer Experience and Engagement spectrum to ensure that there are mitigations and agreed actions in place to counter this if and when they occur. In this ever more transparent times, brand risks are far more likely than ever before, with the impact, whatever the brand risk genesis, squarely on Brand reputation.

11. Brand Collateral Creation

With brand positioning in mind, with its references to target audiences, it is almost always a strategy implementation imperative to make changes to verbal and visual branding.

The foundational part of creating a brand, as outlined above drives everything. Once that is complete, we help you prepare the collateral to underpin the image decided on through the previous phase, and consider how that is translated into your visual identity using branding rules. Brand collateral is the development of the brand assets that comprise your visual and verbal branding designs, marks and music, and as part of this stage, we can help with naming or renaming, logos, straplines, colourways and signature tunes.

• Logos
  Using creative and methods, we brainstorm with your decision makers and marketers on the ideation for your logo and other marks for different channels usage.
• Design
  With the brand truths documented, we work with our graphic designers to build out the brand look and feel of your business or products and services. This will be a prerequisite for creating your website, social media and other communications.
• Rules
  We provide in depth planning and consultancy of the rules of naming, logos, and brand design and positioning including colour and shape cues most appropriate to your brand, and your tribe.
  Brand Strategy Implementation
  Once we have agreed with you what the brand is and what it stands for in its market, how it competes and is positioned, we set about working with you to implement the actions needed to establish, entrench and project the brand.

Creative and strategic, building your brand identity is critical to achieveing the business aims that is the goal of your strategy to plot and deliver. Whether it is for a new brand or for a rebrand, a visual and brand identity is often required to reflect the brand strategic aims that drives all other implementation tasks, from naming to website creation.

12. Project Management and Delivery

Project Management is the discipline and process that ensures that a book of work is started for the implementation when the initial works are discussed, to ensure that it is planned, resourced, approved by the relevant stakeholders and monitored to ensure a concerted and quality delivery. Our skilled project managers have the skill to ensure not only implementation of the brand strategy but as far as the client enables it, an integrated brand to business alignment and an operating model to facilitate it and institute a readiness and transition process to complete the work.

Business and IT Change Delivery  and Project Management

Businesses are beginning to realise that transformation is necessary and indispensable, not just  a nice to have. Complexity, volatility and speed of changing customer tastes and expectations means that formulating a transformation solution, ideally across the spectrum of your business is not a choice so much as an urgent service to your business and its stakeholders. All business goals boil down to winning, thriving, driving in business. Transformation gives your business the capability to confidently perform and keep doing so.

Reach out when some part of your business needs to be undergo fundamental change. You may already know that it’s a long term plan to build a sustainable and responsive business, able not just grapple with the scale and daunting pace of change, but can contend and increase business and brand power not just now, but at an ever increasing rate in the future.

We recognise that successful approaches to transformation depend upon and are led by your business’ values and ideals. Consequently, we do not advocate or seek to implement myopic strategies, bringing instead long term lenses to potential solutions. This is a key reason that our creative consulting services can take you further.

Software Development Services and IT Consulting

Iconify Transformation Technology Consulting and Practice specialise in enterprise architecture and Software and App Design and Development, providing IT Consulting. With a dedicated development team, we are  a software company supporting the full software development lifecycle, from requirements and architecture design to development and testing services, and we can help to enhance or replace existing technology and tools.

Digital Strategy and Innovation Consulting

Digital platforms and social media offer clients logical and virtual proximity to customers, so marketing and organisational thought should increasingly be directed to channels and technology that enable access to all possible interaction points with customers. We help clients counter the challenge of making this seamless, constant, progressive, positive and relevant. We ensure that all efforts must map back positively to showing and sharing clients’ purpose, and meeting the needs of the customer. Our Brand Resonance – Business Growth cycle shows that to grow, your business needs to stay relevant. To stay relevant you have to be dynamic. To be dynamic, your business must be connected to purpose, be relatable and responsive to customers and stakeholders. This will in turn render your brand relevant.

Iconify Innovation Advisory is delivered as part of  our Transformation and Technology practices and we help businesses evaluate aspects like, what value can be captured within your agreed strategy and what’s the smartest, fastest, most effective and in short, innovative way to can do it. We help leaders determine risk appetite and understand your innovation profile and consider which new ideas when implemented will deliver the highest impact, made possible by the cross-functional teams that deliver our creative consulting services.

Create Boss Branding and transform your visual identity

Brand Strategy Collateral

The aim of our creative consulting services is to help you span the entire process of brand building, communications and the operating model to live the brand.

The foundational part of creating a brand, as outlined in Brand Strategy, above is important and ideally, a prerequisite preparing your brand communications materials and once that is complete, we help you prepare the collateral to underpin the image decided on through the previous phase, and consider how that is translated into your visual identity using branding rules. Brand collateral is the development of the brand assets that comprise your visual and verbal branding designs, marks and music, and as part of this stage, we can help with naming or renaming, logos, straplines, colourways and signature tunes.

Logos

Using creative and methods, we brainstorm with your decision makers and marketers on the ideation for your company logo and other marks for different channels usage.

Design

With the brand truths documented, we work with our graphic designers to build out the brand look and feel of your business or products and services. This will be a prerequisite for creating your website, social media and other communications.

Rules

We provide in depth planning and consultancy of the rules of naming, logos, and brand design and positioning including colour and shape cues most appropriate to your brand, and your tribe.

Verbal Branding

We can help with naming and taglines through brainstorming with your stakeholders, on the basis of the outputs of the brand pyramid and brand strategy principles.