Brand strategy crash course
So you’re creating a brand strategy. Maybe you’re creating your own first business. Maybe you’re launching a new product. Maybe you’re in the process of refreshing your identity in line with an exciting transformation. Or maybe you’re at an agency or consultancy, trying to advise your client on their brand strategy.
We can help.
First off, we want to take a second to define our terms. Drawing on Tortoise’s definitions of brand and strategy:
A brand strategy is a flexible plan
for achieving the reputation
you want in market.
This may feel obvious, but we’re going to be coming back to this idea time and again, for two important reasons. One, a lot of brand strategists end up far, far away from anything relating to this question; and two, a lot of the things we are often asked to create don’t actually help define this concept. That doesn’t mean those things shouldn’t be done, but terms matter. If you’re looking to buy the hammer of brand strategy, it had better not be to tighten the screws of business strategy.
So how do we go about making this plan? And what does it actually look like?
Gathering information
The core of a brand strategy is an answer to a deceptively simple question: What reputation do we want to build? Having a precise, well-socialized answer to this question will make every marketing and comms decision about 15% easier—and having the wrong answer, or no answer at all, will set you back incalculably.
To find the answer to that question, you’ll need to gather three sets of inputs, which we visualize as a handy three-part venn diagram:
Authentic
The first section here, Authentic, is where many brand strategy projects begin and end. This sector of the diagram might be populated by a wide range of internal documents and perspectives. A purpose, vision, mission, set of values, or manifesto could inform what’s true about your company, and interviews with senior leaders and innovators at the organization can help you establish where it’s going. What makes something not just true, but authentic, is that it has been true for a long time, and is likely to be true going forward. This sector should include even your company’s baggage, associations that it wishes it could leave behind, if they seem both true and enduring. Often the hardest part of gathering information in this sector is not being too charitable: hopes and dreams are facts in that you hope and dream of them, but that’s different from having achieved them yet.
Relevant
The second section, Relevant, requires research, but is likely abundant. The key fact you need to find is, what do our audiences look for in an organization like ours, or from the organization we want to grow into? What capabilities do they want, what perspectives, what qualities? This should encompass not just what you already deliver - the top middle overlap - but also your competitor’s advantages over you, and the wants and needs that nobody in the category is delivering. Tailor-made customer interviews backed up by quant surveys is the gold standard here, but a lot of this information can be derived from less-customized research, and even from conversations with those who engage with your audiences most, like sales, support, and HR and IR (keeping in mind that your audience is often broader than just customers, but should include investors and employees as well.)
Different
The bottom section, Different, is some of the trickiest information to get. It’s very, very difficult to get an accurate perspective on the competition, not least of all because of the natural drive to feel superior. We can’t tell you how many of our clients have claimed to operate in “a category of one,” or that even though customers think their competitors offer superior products and services, they’re actually wrong. One extremely valuable tool here is competitor’s IR documentation, like annual reports, 10-Ks, and analyst reports, which are designed to convince the people with the purse strings to keep them open. In any case, the key here is to test what really sets you apart from the competition.
As you populate this framework, you’ll find that there are overlaps. When you find a fact that fits in all three categories, one that’s authentically true of you, relevant to your audiences, and different from your competitiors, that’s likely to be a cornerstone of your brand. If you can find a few of those, and build a strong reputation from them, you’ll have a huge head start on convincing your audiences why they should choose you.
One important thing to keep in mind is that this diagram and its contents are not the brand strategy. These are inputs organized into a useful framework for analysis. This is also true of the vast majority of other brand strategy frameworks you’ll see, with names like Brand House or Brand Definition Model. Relying on one of these is kind of like turning in math homework that shows all the work behind your answer, but not the answer itself.
Inspiring action
Before we talk about synthesizing a strategy from these insights, let’s talk about what that strategy will need to do.
A strategy is a tool, meant to persuade people to act a certain way. Your brand strategy is a tool you’re going to use to persuade others to help build your organization’s reputation. Like pieces on a chess board, you want them all working in tandem towards the same goal.
Who do you need to persuade? Well, one obvious answer is the writers, designers, strategists, and generalist marketers who create all of your external communications. But your reputation is shaped by so much more than the talk you talk. The most important audiences you’ll need to persuade are some of the most skeptical: the people that actually shape the experience your organization delivers. Product managers, engineers, customer support, and the like will have a far greater impact on your reputation than any campaign. And most important of all are the internal iunfluencers: the executives that direct, set goals, and tell folks what they’ll be compensated for.
How will you persuade them? What kind of tool could help you get all those people on the same page, understand their role in the story, and feel like they’re also being given a useful tool, not a command?
Articulating a strategy
With this audience to be persuaded in mind, we think the key to articulating your strategy is simplicity. Once you’ve collected your insights—you’ve found a set of ideas that are authentic, relevant, and different—it’s time to strip away the backstory, and crystallize what really matters.
We recommend that a brand strategy be short and sweet, ideally just a single sentence.
Here’s Tortoise’s:
We plan to build a reputation for being thoughtful, patient, and tenacious.
That’s right: a single sentence, describing a desired reputation with just three adjectives.
This sort of approach might seem too simple, too pared back. But in our experience, anything more complicated is not only unhelpful, it’s almost impossible to rally people around. There are a few reasons for this: here are four.
As an extremely tactical benefit, this kind of statement unequivocal and memorable. In a longer statement, or series of statements, audiences will necessarily prioritize one part over another, and only remember bits and pieces. In our experience, even the creators of more complex brand strategies can rarely remember them word for word. Keeping a strategy short and sweet helps prevent confusion, either when reading it or when trying to remember the critical components.
This statement is also actionable. Many strategies articulate what an organization is—that is, a status quo that has already been achieved. It’s hard to see one’s role in that: at most, you help maintain it. But by articulating what we plan to build, we reinforce that this is an future state we’re reaching for, and need help to achieve.
Perhaps most importantly, this statement doesn’t overreach. So many brand strategies aspire to define practically everything about a company: its purpose, its vision, the attributes of its experience. This can create terrible problems with other parts of the organization, especially senior leaders, who will understandably want to shape the organization’s purpose and vision for themselves. A concept like reputation is much more squarely situated in the brand team’s wheelhouse, and is far less likely to generate that level of possessive and defensive friction.
And last of all, because of these other attributes, this strategy is also easy to customize. Brand strategies are never the only piece of the puzzle that a writer, designer, or product engineer is referencing, but one as simple as this can easily become the root of a verbal identity, design system, or experience strategy. “To help build a reputation for being thoughtful, our products must…”
To recap
Dig deep to discover what’s enduringly, authentically true about the thing you’re branding
Ask your customers what parts of that are relevant and different
Double-check what’s different from your competitors
Boil your findings down to three adjectives, and tell everyone in your organization that’s what you aim to build a reputation for
Work with other disciplines to build custom strategies to help them work towards that reputation
Have questions? Have ideas?