In our brand development series, we have covered that the brand is more than a logo. We firmly believe that a brand is a strategic— and, by extension, creative— expression of an organization’s product and culture.
Brands cannot discover success if they stay in silos. The competition in the current market is far too fierce. It has also been enhanced by the mass access to social media. Your potential buyers are always on the hunt for novel experiences.
While that may satisfy their hunger for dopamine, brands also need something concrete. An identity that builds trust in the minds and hearts of the buyer. But it isn’t easy; this identity is hidden under layers of creative thinking and strategic development.
The strategy is not as straightforward as many believe. Leaders, especially finance and other chief execs believe these strategies come overnight. That they can be predicted. This is not true.
Ask any creative you know— or your CMO and they will consult you with two ideas: Creative endeavors need long-term planning and experimentation.
With the rise of influencer marketing, stakeholders and upper management have begun to think going viral with each post is necessary while minimizing the risks inherent to creative endeavors.
The CMO must walk on a double-edged sword of virality, quality, playing a safe game, and getting organizational buy-in on riskier ideas.
And it all begins with a single word: Strategy.
Brand Strategy is not disconnected from organizational strategies and growth.
Strategy gets thrown around a lot in the brand development context. And that is amazing! Upper management is finally on board with brands as a financial driver of success.
What was a centuries-old truth has been rediscovered by corporate leaders: Creativity pays off. And in dividends.
Leaders have to balance this fine line between creative success and failure. No one can predict how the audience will react to your creativity.
The questions that race in the minds of top leaders can range from: –
- What if there is outrage?
to
- What if it is ignored?
And that’s why brands, for most companies, are just social media. CMOs are frustrated by the lack of resources and the rising need to differentiate from other brands. All the while, management breathes heavily on their necks for similar success.
The strategies that most organizations create lack cohesion and substance.
Brands reflect a company’s culture and personality, and the strategies an organization takes to showcase it reveal the minds behind it.
Your solution must speak to its intended audience. Consistently. That is where strategizing begins.
As market saturation increases and start-ups face a90% failure rate, they must amplify their voice and showcase their unique proposition.
In the famous 1996 HBR called What is strategy, Michael E Porter, the father of the modern strategy field, says
“A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve. It must deliver greater value to customers, create comparable value at a lower cost, or do both. The arithmetic of superior profitability follows: delivering greater value allows a company to charge higher average unit prices; greater efficiency results in lower average unit costs.”
It is a timeless piece of advice that is still used to date. Think of all the blogs you have read on brand marketing. It reflects this advice of unique proposition in some form or the other.
Strategies are dynamic
Brand Strategies can be divided into three parts:
- The messaging
- The planning
- The execution or delivery.
And yet, the three can vary from organization to organization. But how?
Strategic implementation requires the understanding of various perspectives and merging them into a cohesive whole.
Strategic brand development requires a lot of moving parts to come together.
Many businesses make the mistake of thinking that a brand is disconnected from their organization. It is not.
As such, brand strategies must reflect it.
What do you think inspires brand loyalty? It’s customer service. Businesses that excel at customer service see a revenue growth of 7-8% above their market standards.
But what does “exceptional customer service” mean? The answer to this lies in crafting a strategy.
And strategy is elusive. It is an abstract concept with a high failure rate. And you must understand it as such. When Marketing leaders are looking to implement their strategies, they must hire the right talent.
As with any creative endeavor, your employees must understand and align with your vision. That means hiring from diverse backgrounds. Luckily, the creative field is filled with them.
Then begins the strategy. Once you have your team, your brand must focus on your message.
The Message
For a brand to thrive, it must show the world its mission through a creative lens. However, as with B2C companies, B2B industries do not have the luxury of targeting everyone. Some of the solutions exist for a specific problem.
And these big B2B deals have various committees involved in buying. The consistency of the message is crucial for a brand strategy.
It must address the specific problem your brand is aiming to solve. Like Semrush, does your brand want to democratize SEO?
Or does your brand aim to solve some other problems? It is the message that displays it. Even though it may change form as an ad, blog, social media copy, website, or the like, the core of this message remains the same.
It is the easiest thing to create because you and your teams know what you do differently. The trick is to consistently say it in unique ways that resonate with your audience. And that is achieved through understanding them.
To recap:
- The message is your brand’s solution.
- It changes form based on the creatives.
- Crafting a message that resonates requires in-depth market research.
The Planning
Phase 1
Strategies are designed to give an organization an edge over the competition and an efficient way of doing things. For brands, the planning stage has to begin with its customers. The common questions are usually demographic, firmographic, and geographic. But as the buyers have evolved, so have the questions.
- Where does your prospect search for potential partnerships?
- What tools will you need to reach them?
- What are you offering that your competitor is not?
- What is your customer interested in?
- Are there any specific behaviors your buyer exhibits?
For example, look at Salesforce’s Trailblazer program. When the community first started, it was one of a kind. A forum based on solving knowledge problems regarding the tool.
It took off.
And organizations still emulate the program to this day. It came about because Salesforce found out that their developers loved solving problems and then sharing them. They realized there was a section of knowledge workers dedicated to tackling and sharing problems; it gave them satisfaction.
Understanding your customer opens up the possibilities to understand the tools you will need, the type of content you and your teams must develop for success, and where it must be displayed.
Planning for a brand requires identification of the channels for reaching the audience.
Phase 2
There are many shiny tools available in the market, ranging from business approaches to AI tools that cost a decent buck.
Your strategies will have to take it all into account. However, every brand needs to self-reflect and understand its position in the market.
- Are they a new brand in an old market?
- An old brand in the new market?
And all the combinations in the middle. As brand strategies go, planning requires understanding the budgeting capabilities of your brand.
Say if you can spend only 100$ on an ad, are you getting the ROAS required to break even? Or if the creative you are commissioning for more than 8000$ is making sense to your audience.
Many strategies fail because they work to imitate rather than innovate. Your endeavor should make sense in your brand’s context.
Take invisible branding or un-branding as an example: this type of strategy presents a minimalist and cost-effective approach to branding. Leaving logos and designs behind in favor of providing high-quality products.
This approach will work based on the context of the brand. And its personality.
For smaller brands, they must know the type of personality they want to show the world. While large brands have the freedom of exploration.
Recapping planning:
- Understand your customer. Market research is crucial.
- Crafting a compelling message and executing ideas is based on buyer behavior
- A brand must think of its budget before planning a campaign
- Strategies that imitate rather than innovate might lose sense of their brand’s context
The execution or delivery
Strategies involve a lot of moving parts for success. As with organizations, strategic ideas cannot remain in silos. That is why Go-to-market works so well. It is based on silo breakdown.
The message and your planning are as good as the execution. A lot of strategies fail in this stage.
And why is that? It is because the tools you are using are similar to those of your competitors. Think about it: you have access to AI, and so do they. They have access to CRMs, and so do you.
We have reached a saturation of tools. To break this competitive deadlock, an organization must focus on their teams’ innate creativity. They will drive the execution.
A company must create a new or innovate an old way of delivery.
For example, Salesforce staged its famous protest outside the doors of Siebel. Siebel had all the tools Salesforce did. But they did not have one certain aspect that made Salesforce today what it is: Marc Benioff’s eccentricity.
He was not afraid to take risks. And strategic execution is about risk, experimentation, and pivoting.
It is the fail fast, pivot quickly attitude that leads strategies to succession.
Execution is unique to your organization. We cannot stress this enough. If it were not, your competitors might be able to copy you and level the playing field.
Case Study of Execution: Kao
For further reading: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/132211169.pdf
Kao is one of Japan’s producers of household items, makeup, and toiletries. But in 1992, they came to dominate the floppy disk market. But they faced two distinct problems
- There was a lot of competition in the retail floppy disk market.
- The floppy disk market was changing. It was wildly profitable, but the profits wouldn’t last indefinitely.
They solved the second problem by identifying how quickly they would need to generate profits and leave the market.
On the other hand, they solved the first by identifying that their surface science enabled them to create high-quality floppy disks with no dropout on playback and then positioning as an OEM and selling to the public market. This move made Kao the dominant force in the FD market.
Imagine the creative genius behind the idea. Someone in Kao realized that their method of delivering cosmetic products could be applied to floppy disks.
And they executed it by understanding the market needs of their time.
This strategic execution was a brand shift. A successful one.
Any brand that understands its offers can effectively diversify and provide value to broad customer segments.
Strategic execution can thus be distilled into: –
- Understanding your product
- Finding the market that will appreciate your product
- Building a message around it
- Planning for financial success by looking at the market trends and values
- Identifying the position you can adopt relative to your market
- Entering the field
For SaaS brands, all of this plays out digitally (for the most part).
Be unique and take risks. Brand strategy is about the creative identification of success.
Brand Strategy has always been thought of as an abstract idea. Something unreachable and delegated to social media posts.
But it is more, so much more. It is a systematic approach, similar to organizational development. Businesses that believe a brand exists in the pages of online media will fail to reach their audience. And their message will drown in obscurity.
From thought leadership to reaching the right audience, a brand strategy has to be more than content, ads, and creatives with no direction.
At Ciente.io, we understand that a brand is a tangible identity of an organization. We help orchestrate an experience for your users. And build strategies that enable you to reach your relevant audience through compelling content.