12 Principles of Brand Strategy

Do you know what really differentiates your company from everyone else in your industry?

Sadly, most companies just regurgitate all their services when they market their company.

Here are the five things I found that cause high-end clients to stand in line and pay a higher price.

1. Reputation. You must communicate trust before anyone even cares about the rest of the message. What do others say about you?
2. Experience. I’m hiring a builder to build a home for me in Florida. I want to know he has LOTS of experience, right? Are you communicating that?
3. Specialized Knowledge. What unique training do you or your staff have that sets you apart?
4. Systems. What is the unique service experience you offer?
5. Guarantee. Finally, what happens if someone is not thrilled with your product or service. Include that in your message!

Achieving a position of market prominence is undoubtedly the holy grail of business performance. It’s a more powerful experience than managing to dominate a market for a period of time. Market dominance is typically an exciting, albeit brief, experience, usually demanding a hefty modicum of chance. Market prominence, on the other hand, connotes an imposing position that endures. It isn’t luck. It can’t be achieved by commercializing the latest fad. You don’t get there by simply being in the right place at the right time. It belongs solely to those companies that consistently and repetitively do the right things, and it can be made to last for generations.

It’s common knowledge that dominating a market category, even temporarily, can be very profitable. But what if all of the categories in which you compete already have imposing market leaders? Future competitors will know how to invent a new category and declare ownership. Sounds audacious, but it’s perfectly achievable, and we’ll explain how.

Here are the characteristics we measured to identify market leaders:

• Name Recognition.

  Ask the major participants in any market segment, and they tend to mention the same names.

• Expertise Recognition.

  Market leaders are invariably successful at attaching, in the minds of major repetitive buyers, qualities associated with advanced expertise and performance, whether or not the expertise actually exists.

• Premium Pricing.

  Buyers honestly believe they will get more value from market leaders and are typically willing to pay for it (Apple seems to come to mind).

• Preferential Competitive Treatment.

  In a competitive sales arena, clients often allow market leaders to skip the qualifications stage of the competition and go directly to the shortlist.

• Prestige among Employees.

  Survey professionals in any defined market and ask them about the best places to work. You will find a high correlation between market prominence and desirable work environments.

Utilize Persistent Branding

Branding is a phenomenon that has been studied in the business community for many years. However, even though its value has been well established, few companies effectively exploit its power. We found several examples of companies that do it intuitively, but tomorrow’s leaders will execute a specific branding strategy.

Several firms such as Coca-Cola, Apple, Kellogg, Microsoft, Gillette, Starbucks, and Campbell have consistently not only maintained higher performance than their immediate competitors but have also performed above the market average.

You might think this performance is only exhibited for differentiated products, however even in a commodity product like salt, we see over an extended time the industry leader, Morton Salt, has held both a price premium and market share advantage.

Morton Salt, established in 1848, has been the industry leader for quite a long time.

And so, what drives performance? We find that brand equity contributes to nearly half of the elicited value when using Return on Sales (ROS) as the performance metric, brand equity.

Knowing how brands influence firms’ performance makes the superior persistence of brand performance a prominent issue.

In a situation where you’re selling to multiple personalities, it’s best first to connect everyone on a common ground then clearly articulate what’s in it for each of them.

The goal is to stimulate an engaging conversation that allows us to change perception, diagnose expectations, and clarify the dialogue.

That’s the essence of developing a brand strategy – the foundation of your communication that builds authentic relationships between you and your audience.

Defining your brand strategy allows you to utilize marketing, advertising, public relations, and social media to consistently and accurately reinforce your character.

Without defining the core strategy, all channels of communication can often become a hit-and-miss expense.

Here are 12 Key Brand Strategy Principles that I assert will help you achieve business success:

1. Define Your BrandIt starts with your authenticity, the core purpose, vision, mission, position, values, and character.  Next, focus on what you do best and then communicated your unique strengths through consistency. There are many examples of companies acquiring other brands but only to sell them off later because they don’t fit within the brand and its architecture.Microsoft acquired Razorfish in 2007 when it bought aQuantive, a digital marketing services company, for about US $6 billion, then sold it a few years later for $530 million.Simply put, Razorfish isn’t a good fit with Microsoft’s brand strategy.
2. Your Brand is Your Business ModelYour brand strategy must support and challenge your business model to maximize the potential within your brand. Think of personal brands like Oprah, Donald Trump, Martha Stewart, and Richard Branson. These individuals practically built their business right on top of their personal brand; everything they offer is an extension of their brand promise.
3. Consistency, Consistency, ConsistencyConsistency in your message is the key to differentiate.Own your position on every reference point for everything that you do. President Obama focused on one message only during his campaign, CHANGE. BMW has always been known as the “ultimate driving machine“.
4. Start from the Inside OutEveryone in your company can tell you what they see, think, and feel about your brand.  So that’s the story you should bring to the customers and drive impact beyond just the walls of marketing. That’s an example of how Zappos empowers employees to strengthen consumer perception of its brand.
5. Connect on the Emotional Level.A brand is not a name, logo, website, ad campaigns, or PR; albeit important, those are only the tools, not the brand. Instead, a brand is a desirable idea manifested in products, services, people, places, and experiences.Starbucks created a third space experience that’s desirable and exclusive so people would want to stay and pay for the overpriced coffee.Sell people something that satisfies their physical needs, their emotional needs, and their need to identify themselves to your brand.
6. Empower Brand ChampionsAward those that love your brand to help drive the message, facility activities so they can be part of the process.If your brand advocate doesn’t tell you what you should or should not be doing, it’s time to evaluate your brand promise.Go and talk to someone that works at the Apple retail store or an iPhone owner, and you’ll see just how passionate they are about Apple. It’s a lifestyle and a culture.
7. Stay Relevant and FlexibleA well-managed brand is constantly making adjustments. Branding is a process, not a race, not an event, so expect to continuously tweak your message and refresh your image.Successful brands don’t cling to the old ways just because they worked in the past; instead, they try to re-invent themselves by being flexible, which frees them to be more savvy and creative.Here is an example: when the economy tanked a year ago, automaker Hyundai came out with an assurance program that lets you return your car if you lose your job with no further financial obligation and no damage to your credit.The results?As of the end of that February, only a few buyers have taken advantage of this program, but it has boosted their sales by 14% year-over-year in Q1; only one of the two companies increased revenue while companies such as Honda experienced a drop of more than 30%.
8. Align Tactics with StrategyConvey the brand message on the most appropriate media platform with specific campaign objectives.Because consumers are bombarded by commercial messages every day, they’re also actively blocking out the great majority of them.Invest your branding efforts on the right platform that communicates to the proper channels.Television may be expensive, but it has a broader reach, wider demographics, and can produce immediate impact.  On the other hand, social media may seem cheap, but it takes time, resources and may not give you the desired outcome.
9. Measure the EffectivenessFocus on the ROI (return on investment) is the key to measuring your strategies’ effectiveness. Often it is how well your organization can be inspired to execute the strategies. It could also be reflected in brand valuation or how your customers react to your product and price adjustments. Ultimately it should resonate with sales, and that means profitability. But don’t just focus on increasing sales when you could be getting a profit boost by reducing overhead and expenses as well. Give yourself options to test different marketing tactics, make sure they fit your brand authenticity and aligns with your strategy.
10. Cultivate Your CommunityCommunity is a powerful and effective platform on which to engage customers and create loyalty towards the brand.In an active community, members feel a need to connect in the context of the brand’s consumption.We all want to be an insider of something, and it excites us to tell people which community we’re part of and what knowledge we possess.In many ways, it’s our ego that prides us to be part of a sports team or a professional group. Guess what car would members of the Porsche club consider first when it’s time to purchase their next vehicle?Brand communities allow companies to collaborate with customers in all phases of value creation via crowdsourcing such as product design, pricing strategy, availability, and selling methods.
11. Keep Your Enemies CloserEven if you have the most innovative, highly desirable product, you can expect new competitors with a superior value proposition to enter your market down the road.The market is always big enough for new players to improve what you deliver better, faster, cheaper. Call it hyper-competition or innovation economics; competition could be good for you, believe it or not.It challenges your brand to elevate the strategy and deliver more value.Just look at how the Big Three (automobile manufacturers General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) got crushed in the 1980s and ’90s by competition from Germany and the Japanese. The Germans and Japanese made a better product and developed a more efficient manufacturing process by focusing on Quality Control. They also worked on developing a more robust brand by focusing on Customer perception. Subsequently, they command a higher brand loyalty. In 2008, Toyota overtook GM while Honda passed Chrysler in US sales. Even though statistics showed that the American auto manufacturers had caught up and, in some cases, even surpassed the German & Japanese manufacturers in quality by the mid-2000s, their brands did not fully recover as the Japanese and German Brands continued to be considered the better quality auto due to shrewd Band Dominance by the foreign manufactures.
12. Practice Brand Strategy ThinkingIDEO’s CEO Tim Brown calls design thinking “a process for creating new choices“.Essentially, it means not settling for the available choices but thinking outside the box without being limited.This concept applies to your brand strategy creation process that is called brand strategy thinking.It’s easier to execute tactics than develop a complete strategy because it implies the possibility of failure.It’s much faster to emulate what worked for your competitor than to create something original and creative.Although I believe in replicating a strategy that has proven to work, your message must be authentic when it comes to your brand. Another company’s strategy may be valid for them; however, that’s not you, and it may be perceived as a bad fit, even false, or a cheap imitation to your target audience. Brand strategy thinking is about creating the right experience that involves all the stakeholders to foster the best strategy.Leverage the ecosystem that includes your employees, partners, and customers to help you articulate your brand strategy so they sync together.Remember that your employees are a significant influence regarding your brand’s perceived value. Every team member who has contact with or speaks to a client or potential customer affects your brand. Do they represent your brand well? Does their manner of dress, attitude, sense of helpfulness, display of knowledge, speech pronunciation, grammar, and syntax support the image you are trying to present? You must ensure that your team is aware of how they support your brand and how they need to help deliver your brand message.The takeaway: Having a brand strategy will bring clarity and meaning to your brand so you can focus on making, creating, and selling things and services about which people genuinely care.If you could do that, your brand would be unique and memorable on its way to become an esteemed brand.

Create Marketing Breakthroughs

There will be some instances for which your company is considered a “favorite” and others for which your company would be considered a “long shot”. The acquisition of market prominence requires orchestrating “breakthroughs”, winning sales for which you are not the most qualified competitor. Tomorrow’s market leaders must develop the capacity to walk into a room filled with more experienced and credentialed competitors and walk out with the sale. Companies who can’t pull this off will be destined to an eternity of similarly repetitive projects from similarly repetitive buyers while generating uninterestingly bland margins.

You must break through the “Clutter Factor” in today’s markets, i.e., capture the attention of your target customers amongst the deluge of marketing messages that hit your clients from TV, Radio, Text messages, emails, social media, mobile media, magazine ads, Web Ads, Blog Sites, etc.

Today’s market leaders are adept at discussing services and product characteristics, and capabilities. Tomorrow’s leaders will be just as comfortable discussing their clients’ business strategies. Business owners spend enormous energy developing marketing strategies, production strategies, capital management strategies, and human resource strategies. As an “expert”, they will expect you to explain to them how your products or services can be used as an asset in executing these identified goals.

I submit that an effective marketing effort should include Education-based Marketing that initially does not try to sell anything, instead focuses on developing the customer relationship. Think of the power of an infomercial about dust mites, other creatures and microbes that live in your carpet, the potential disease and ailments they cause that are only subsequently tied to a solution – carpet cleaning.

Oh, by the way, Company Name can help you solve this menacing problem.

Another prerequisite: you must make full use of all the media types that your target customers use. For example, if your customers have business Facebook pages, then you need to have an active Facebook page too.

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