Energizing Brands with Strategy, Planning and Implementation to grow your business

Implementation of the right brand strategy for an organization will go a long way in achieving the organizational goals. The relationship between an organization and the lives it touches can be compared to the relationship humans hold with their dear ones, as this bond & clear communication between the organization and its internal & external stakeholders can be managed by having a well-thought-out ‘Brand Strategy’ in place.

Understanding and addressing brand strategy with an analyzed approach is required to achieve the goal of bringing the audiences on to the same purpose as the organization, as after achieving this, it becomes easier to follow through the roadmap of the organization & its goals.

Brand strategy planning and implementation involve some key factors to be addressed in order, and the roadmap to address a few key factors is discussed in the following sections.

Curation of questions

Each brand has its unique approach to measuring its brand strategy. Post-pandemic the market witnessed a spike in organizations outsourcing brand strategy roadmaps to brand development companies. 

When an organization is thinking about creating a blueprint for its, the first step to take is to curate the questions, irrespective of whether they do it in-house or seek the services of a professional Brand Consulting & Management specialist.

We have curated & listed down questions the organization should aim to address before implementing its Brand Strategy:

What is the purpose of our organization’s existence?

What problem is the organization solving?

What is the DNA of your brand?

What are the objectives of the organization?

How do we reach the objectives?

Who are our target audiences?

How does the audience feel about the problem they face?

How does our audience want to be benefited?

How do they want to feel about receiving the solution and in which way?

Who are our competitors and how are we going to be different?

How do we plan on benefitting our audience?

What is the tone we need to use for addressing the audience to achieve the goals?

What is the purpose of our organization’s existence?

Every successful organization plays a part in the growth of the economy & society at large and strives to solve some problem. Once the organization can decipher this, it will be able to list its objectives. And when the purpose is clearly defined and articulated to everyone in the system, people identify with it and work in cohesion.

What problem is the organization solving?

Once the management has answers to this key question creating the blueprint for the organization’s success journey will be far simpler and will help the leaders to align their resources in the relevant direction.

What is the DNA of your brand?

Like us humans, brands also have unique DNA, and organizations that can identify their DNA will stay relevant. It should not just stop at identifying the DNA but should ensure that everyone in the system lives it and bring out the uniqueness of the brand in all their actions, interactions, processes, and practices across their ecosystem

Importance of objectives

Defining the objectives of an organization will provide the basic roadmap for the organization. Objectives can be categorized into long-term and short-term. Long-term comprises the strategic objectives of the organization which determines the organization’s vision, and short-term majorly involves operational objectives which will aid the organization’s long-term vision. Once both have been defined, the organization will have a clear roadmap that can be measured and achieved.

Defining objectives

Addressing an objective requires the cross-validation of the objective against the organizational vision and mission. After analyzing and finding an objective, consideration should be taken to welcome iterations, as cross-validation of the determined objective will go through multiple iterations before finalizing the same. The finalized objective should be a catalyst in aligning with organizational goals.

Figuring out the audience

Defining and curating the objective for the organization will transition it to the next process, which is to find the target audience. Organizations need to research their industry and conduct multiple studies to understand the audience, and then analyze the segment of the audience which they can address. One also needs to keep in mind, that its audience is not limited to just their customers, suppliers & partner but the entire society at large. So, brands should have a different set of objectives for their primary & secondary and further multiple sets of audiences.

Addressing the benefits

An integral part of the success of an organization lies in the simple aspect of addressing and solving the end-user problem. Defining the benefits offered should be validated from 2 perspectives: first from the organization’s standpoint, and second from the audience’s standpoint. Few exemplar questions to be addressed are listed below from an audience’s perspective: 

Who can address my problem? 

Who provides the best value for the cost incurred?

Why should I select company X and not company Y? 

What is the credibility of this service provider?

Are they customer-centric?

Audience mindset

A deeper understanding of the target mindset across the lifecycle is necessary for an organization, as the relationship starts from the point where the audiences start facing a problem, and the organization steps in to provide the closest or the perfect solution to alleviate the problem.

Creating awareness through various platforms to provide the information required for the audience to understand their problem better, would be the first step. Once the audience is aware of the problem they face, they will go further seeking solutions that will make their life easier and shortlist brands they believe could be trusted, to alleviate the problem.

Creating awareness about the solution/service is what the organization should target next. When the audience is convinced about the need for a solution, their dilemma would be in selecting the solution from the right organization, and it’s at this stage that brands should target the audience with their solution/service USPs using the right tools to engage, educate, empower and allow the audience take an informed selection decision.

New-age audiences prefer to not be sold, and 80% of decision-making is made by them through research on the internet or references before the final purchase, this leaves the organizations to be aware of the complete lifecycle of the audience and plan their implementation strategy through the entire lifecycle. 

Brands should also figure out where, when, and how to disseminate their communication, and foresee that their audience today will also keep evolving with lifestyle changes, propensity to earn more, and many factors, and hence they might

Competition 

An organization should be aware of the ecosystem it is a part of, as this saves it from not searching the complete ocean. By this, we mean the time and cost saved by the organization by the insights they gain through market research of their competitors and peers, which guides them to not take the paths that lead to failure. There can be a lot of learnings and best practices when an organization observes and studies its competition, as there could be some strategies that can be adopted from them or some that need to be avoided to prevent any setbacks in meetings its objectives.

How do we plan on benefitting our audience?

Once a brand is clear about its objectives, its purpose of existence, the problem that it intends to solve, understands its belief system, and has gauged its prospects and competition; it needs to create its Brand Strategy blueprint, stage-wise, and ecosystem-wise roadmap on how it will operate and conduct its business in a manner that not only allows it to reach its objective but also benefit its target audiences through best possible business practices that are in line with its brand belief system and sync with the expectations of its different set of audiences.

Tone of voice

The tone of voice is the most crucial section to be addressed by the organization before embarking on the implementation of the brand strategy. Tone defines the style of language used by the organization to have any kind of communication with all its stakeholders.

Defining the tone can be done by breaking it down into segments such as concept, style of writing, the kind of words, vocabulary, grammar, verbosity, punctuation, style of storytelling, etc.

The tone of voice is how the character of the organization’s business comes through in all forms of communication, both written and spoken. It’s not about what is being said, but rather the way it is said, and the perception it brings about among the audiences who are likely to come in contact with the communication piece.

Conclusion

Analyzing and implementing a Brand Strategy can be the first right step for the organization toward achieving its goals. Brand Strategy is not a short-term plan; it’s a process that keeps evolving to suit the various situations during its growth path, but without altering the core strategy as far as possible.

A process of consistency is required to implement a successful brand strategy, which achieves what the organization is looking for. 

We have over 12 years of experience in developing, designing, strategizing, orchestrating, growing & managing the business of building successful brands for large SMEs and enterprises across the globe. We are proud to mention that we are one of the best-sought from the list of brand development companies in India.

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