The High-Value Impact of Leading with Brand Strategy

Brand strategy is the key to achieving the more impactful outcomes of great branding – those that go beyond increasing awareness and controlling perceptions.

The reason? Brand strategy is the plan for propelling your brand into action.

Rather than merely guiding brand development (the importance of which cannot be understated!), brand strategy also masterminds its activation and management – from launching the brand in a powerful way to maintaining its integrity over time to leading its continuous evolution.

These top five areas are where a thorough, thoughtful and effective brand strategy can create the most high-value impact for your company.

Put your company in the driver’s seat with the Brand Strategy Playbook!

1. Empowers Customer Journey

In the world where customers seeking solutions have completed more than 67% of their research before ever talking to a company representative, in-depth understanding of your company’s customer journey is often the difference between being considered or not.

Yet understanding the customer journey beyond the superficial level takes much research and data, and the practice of customer journey mapping is a difficult and ongoing endeavor that many companies find challenging to tackle – despite the high cost of inaction.

Fortunately, the development of thorough brand strategy – one that is able to guide every how, what, where and when of marketing communications – inherently makes customer journey understanding a priority and provides much of the information you’ll need for the journey mapping process.

If you are one of the countless companies that has been discussing the need to map your customer journey for a long time but have yet to take action, developing your brand strategy will put this imperative on the fast track, providing you with direction and insight necessary to improve the customer experience at every touchpoint.

2. Locks in Brand Loyalty

Great brands thrive by engaging their customers, earning their attention and turning them into lifelong champions. This kind of fierce loyalty can only be achieved when the brand is grounded in a comprehensive brand strategy.

Brand strategy serves as a compass that ensures the consistency, meaning and relevancy of all brand expressions and experiences, building trust and an unbreakable bond between a company and its audiences.

In fact, brand strategy is the action plan for how to engage and delight your customers, thus solidifying and forwarding the relationship with every interaction.

Even a well-designed and articulated brand doesn’t come with this kind of instructions – only a full brand strategy does.

3. Activates Employee Engagement and Brand Ambassadorship

Too many times companies re-brand themselves and see no real change internally. The reason for this is simple:

The re-brand doesn’t take hold with employees because although the company changed its outer appearance and message, it didn’t consider the strategy for engaging its workforce and for turning employees into brand ambassadors.

Related content: The Forgotten Audience: Crafting Your Brand to Attract and Keep Talent

Just as brand strategy provides the guide for locking in brand loyalty from external customers, it provides the same for internal teams. It extends the brand throughout the company and ensures that every employee feels part of the brand and knows how to talk about it and embody it.

In short, once in place, an effective brand strategy and the clarity of vision that is inherent within it have the power to mobilize people around the brand and focus their efforts on championing it inside and outside of the organization.

Related content: Living Your Brand: How to Ensure Your Brand Isn’t Dead on Arrival

4. Carries Companies Out of Commoditization

Differentiating on value rather than price is the most sought-after advantage in today’s commoditized marketplace, and a well-conceived brand strategy is directly tied to a company’s ability to increase its perceived value – especially in those industries that sell the intangibles.

Related content: Combating Commoditization Doesn’t Have to Be a Battle 

Companies with effective brand strategies stay tall above their competitors and overcrowded marketplace and command premium instead of being forced to play low ball. In fact, brand strategy is what lifts a company out of the lowest-bid-wins game because it leads to a differentiated brand with a much more powerful and meaningful story to tell.

5. Creates a Pathway to Evolution

Perhaps the highest-value impact an effective brand strategy has is on a company’s ability to withstand the test of time and its ability to pivot, adapting to changes in economy, business practices, culture, technology and more.

Well-conceived brand strategies allow companies to remain relevant indefinitely by freeing them from being defined by their offerings or even category.

This freedom provides flexibility for endless brand extensions and allows companies to evolve their offering mix to keep pace with marketplace change.

In other words, a well-conceived brand strategy is your company’s ticket to continual evolution, ensuring lasting impact on the world and the people it supports far into the future.

At Substance151, we help companies develop and execute strong brand strategies, resulting in stand-out brands that build equity and strengthen reputation. Contact us and let’s discuss how we can help you build a brand strategy playbook that will crush your competition.