Brand Strategy as a Superpower for Brand Building

Brand Strategy as a Superpower

When it comes to brand building, integrated brand strategy is a superpower that helps your business achieve its goals and address many of the most pressing concerns you might be facing.

Business concerns we hear about the most centre around similar themes:

“We’re a little lost on digital”, “we need better branding”, “how can we achieve greater growth”, “how do we get fit for purpose software for our business”, “we need a culture change”, “we need to manage change”.

The way that businesses with durability and stamina deal with solving these questions are what makes them sustainable brands. Understanding this literally separates those who play for short term impact and those who play for keeps because strategy is their superpower.

Why?

Because they recognise that all efforts in these respects touch on brand building. If your efforts in your business and the way benefits are being delivered are not playing a part in building your brand, shaping your perception and serving and engaging your customers better, you need to re-evaluate them.

Brand building is the process of developing and shaping your business’s brand through the discovery of what your purpose, positioning and principles are with the aim of positioning your business in the market and in the perception of your customer and building awareness on that basis.

Differentiation is critical to that process but digital marketing – SEO, SMM, Email Marketing and PPC have changed the game. As useful as these advances are, without the relevant brand discovery, development and strategy process, these processes will not deliver the desired outcomes.

What is a Brand?

Your brand is the sum total of everything your business stands for, does or doesn’t do and the position you occupy in the minds of people who know of you. It is the perception people have of you and the attributes, they ascribe to your product or service, the ways you deliver them, your culture and ways of working or all of the above. All of these considerations go into brand building and make it demonstrate the necessity for an integrated brand strategy as a superpower in meeting business goals.

Very often, however, how people feel about your brand has nothing at all to do with the features of your product or service but primarily with how your product/service makes them feel. The power lies in the fact that it can command a premium for your product or service. The sum total of your brand contributes to your brand reputation, your brand equity and the power of your brand.

Consistency of communications, customer experience and service are critical to customer perception. It takes time and strategy to build a brand and that’s why long-range vision is so important. With the right planning and preparation, customer engagement can be increased and enhanced to improve advocacy and sales.

What is brand building?

From a brand assets perspective, a recognisable, well regarded and even loved brand is the diamond standard and is irreplaceable as a guarantee of the brand promise, quality and calibrated expectations. Small to mid-size businesses are frequently competing with bigger brands who have bigger budgets to spend on advertising to entrench their position and supremacy.  This means that smaller rivals must build up a strong brand personality and awareness in order to compete smartly.

Brand differentiation is critical to and drives brand awareness, which is the first stage of building brand power. At the heart of brand building is the requirement to integrate and synthesise brand strategy  – positioning, purpose, principles to create an authentic and resonant entity. Getting this right is the blueprint for building brand power.

A brand built with a holistic and strategic strategy can capture brand love and loyalty and shore up brand equity, so a brand building process is going to be one of the most important things that a company can undertake in the competitive stakes, and will be increasingly important in the coming years. Therefore, so any effective brand building process will need to incorporate shrewd brand visibility strategies.

The Strategy to Resonance Equation

Knowing what you want to achieve and all the factors needed to align across all parts of your business is how strategy can function as a superpower.

The idea of resonant brands derives from Keller’s brand resonance building block that suggests that resonance is the strength of a customer’s psychological engagement with the brand and the steps to how this is formed. Performing these steps lead to differentiating, brand resonance and gaining brand power. Answering the strategic questions thrown up in developing an integrated brand strategy across all of your business facets and functions is key to attaining resonance.

In the final analysis, your brand represents a promise and how well you keep your brand promise determines whether yours is a resonant brand.  Resonant brands will grow to eclipse their rivals. Your brand promise is a position in the marketplace, much like a territory. What you represent in the market to people that you want to influence and move, is attributable to how accurately, acutely and completely you can appeal to that target market. What brand visibility strategies should be employed? How compelling can you make your message? How well can you enable customers to believe you can give them what they want and how well will you deliver on that?

These are the questions that brand strategy seeks to answer in order to effectively promote what your business stands for and enhance your place in the market to make your brand resonant because iconic brands are resonant brands, who rule their territory, and garner brand love and loyalty.