The importance of brand strategy

What is a brand? In a nutshell, it defines the identity of an organization, product or service. It is more than names and logos. The identity must be based on a unique idea and told through a compelling story. You need to connect with potential customers and form positive emotional bonds. The idea must be distinctive from the competition and relevant to the world view of the target markets. It must also be authentic, which means that it is not enough to simply make empty claims. The organization really needs to live its brand.

Brands increase the value of products and services by differentiating them from the competition, creating positive mental associations and forming emotional relationships with the customer. Philip Kotler of the Kellogg School of Management said that “if you’re not a brand, you’re a commodity. Then price is everything and the low-cost producer is the only winner.”

Competing on price may increase sales in the short term, but it is a dangerous strategy for anyone serious about building a sustainable and profitable business. Brands give companies the means to break free from constant price competition, increase the value of their services, lower their marketing costs, and build long-term customer loyalty.

Building a sustainable and successful brand requires careful planning and consistency. You need a strategy. The brand strategy is the plan that defines the ideas and stories behind the brands, the structure and relationship of the brands within the organization and the main elements of identification. These can include things like company and product names, tone of voice, logos, color schemes, etc. It also provides the framework for implementing the brands throughout the organization’s operations and using them to efficiently work toward business objectives. It is not just a cosmetic exercise; It is a key element of business strategy.

With a clear strategy, managers can make the right, coordinated, and informed decisions not just in marketing, but across all departments, from product development to customer service to recruiting. This process of embodying the brand idea throughout the organization is what we call branding.

The beauty of branding is that by telling your customers authentic and compelling stories, you not only make your products more engaging and valuable, but you give your customers something to talk about. Humans naturally love to tell and share stories. By giving them good stories to tell, you gain access to what is by far the cheapest and most effective form of promotion: word of mouth.

Few organizations manage to reap the full benefits of word of mouth, and worse, for many organizations it spreads more negative stories than positive ones. To make up for the lack of positive word of mouth, organizations spend huge sums of money on ineffective marketing exercises. Without an effective brand strategy, these exercises are often unfocused, inconsistent, and inauthentic. Consequently, they rarely pay for themselves, let alone make a profit.

So what is the role of marketing? To a large extent, branding is the antithesis of marketing. Branding is the most effective way to generate positive word of mouth, making it cheaper and more effective than traditional marketing techniques.

Marketing without a clear brand strategy is a chaotic and expensive exercise that is essentially little more than shouting and bragging about your products and services. People don’t like or trust showoffs. If you want to have an impact, you need to talk to them like adults. With exposure to thousands of marketing messages every day, consumers have become largely immune to meaningless promotional messages, filtering them out and filing them away in their mental recycle bins.

However, there is still a place for marketing, and in many cases, marketing is part of the branding process as it provides a means of spreading the brand story. This explains why there is so much confusion regarding the difference between them. Marketing used to be about promoting products and services. Successful marketing now focuses on brand promotion.

If an organization developed a perfect brand idea but did nothing to promote it, no one would have heard of it. The story would never get out and the strategy would not succeed. Therefore, it is important to combine the strengths of branding and marketing to reach your target market.

The most successful organizations combine a confident, forward-thinking idea with a solid, organized strategy. They then use carefully targeted marketing to help spread their story. The success of their brands means that as time goes by, the need for formal marketing reduces and the effectiveness of any existing marketing increases, thus paving the way for increased profits and organizational growth.

In conclusion, brands are a key element in building profitable businesses with long-term sustainability. When executed well, they increase sales, add value to products and services, and reduce marketing costs. They also give focus to a business, boost staff morale and increase share value.

Building successful brands is not simply a cosmetic exercise. They must be consistent, loyal to the organization and present in all its activities. This is only possible when there is a clear brand strategy to act as a framework for their implementation and to ensure they are always working towards business goals. Marketing has its place as a tool for promoting brands, but once they’ve made a connection with the core of their target market, successful brands can sell themselves through word of mouth.