Effective branding starts with a well-defined brand that holds relevancy to your market. Having a logo, tagline, and business card does not complete your branding experience. You have to carefully consider and define all of the key brand elements in order to effectively brand your positions. There are 5 that will be covered in this article. On top of that, you have to instill your brand into every level of your organization and develop discipline and consistency into all behaviors, actions, and communication both internally and externally for the organization. Until you have this covered, you are not on the path to successful branding strategy. The following are 5 key elements of successful brand strategy.
Personality
Brand traits provide an illustration of what the organization wants its brand to be known for. Consider specific personality traits that you want clients, prospects, partners, and employees to use when describing your organization. Having about 5 traits is ideal but 4-6 will do. Each trait should be a single term (usually an adjective).
Position
The brand position is the aspect of the brand that is a description of what your organization does and for whom, what unique value you provide and how a customer benefits from with you or the product/service you provide. It also describes the key way(s) you differentiate from your competition. Once you have your brand position defined, make it available in different versions, 25, 50, and 100 words, respectively.
Promise
The brand promise is the one most important thing that the organization promises to deliver to its customers every single time. To create your brand promise, consider what customers, partners, and employees should expect to take from every interaction with you. Every business decision made in regard to the organization should be weighed against this promise to be sure that it fully reflects the promise or at least doesn’t contradict it.
Story
Brand story illustrates the history of the organization, along with how its history adds value and credibility to the brand. It also includes a summary of the products or services you offer.
Associations
Brand associations are simply the specific physical artifacts that comprise the brand. This includes the name, logo, taglines, colors, imagery, font, and other elements. Your brand promise must be reflected in the brand associations. The associations must also reflect all of your brand traits and support your statement of brand positioning.
As stated in an article from Entrepreneur, building a stronger culture begins with the brand. It’s important to take branding strategy seriously and to not falter because doing so can set your brand back significantly. There are many tools available for you to successfully brand your company and make your mark. It is recommending that you document the elements we covered in a Brand Book and provide every employee with this guideline so they can use it in their daily activity. Such activities help ensure that you build effective habits to execute brand strategy in a manner that is consistent and company-wide.
Originally posted on September 26, 2014 @ 3:22 pm
