Develop a branding strategy, a consistent mood/theme for all your marketing efforts
Once a company has determined what its brand promise is and what its brand values and attributes are, the work isn’t done. The company still has to develop a brand strategy that uses those key elements to shape how it does business.
The brand strategy must take into account internal and external audiences, how your company will implement the brand promise with both, and how adherence to the strategy and the value of the brand will be measured.
To begin to develop a brand strategy for your audience, you need to map your internal stakeholders by division, role, or both. Don’t forget to include important operational functions like human resources. Human resources and similar operational teams are critical to ensuring your brand promise is carried into the life of your company.
Use your map of internal audiences and an understanding of your company’s culture and the way it operates to develop activities—tactics—that indoctrinate internal audiences with the company’s brand promise, why it matters, and how it will be implemented.
Be sure employees understand why they should care personally and how it applies to their everyday lives.
Your internal audiences can help you develop the strategy for external audiences and often involving them at some level in developing the methods by which the company keeps the brand promise with external audiences helps solidify their buy-in. Work with your different product or service managers to determine how the brand promise can be fulfilled in the way items are presented and sold and how customer service is performed after the sale.
Does Your Audiences Get It?
Brand strategies should cover how activity will be measured and how the brand’s value will be monitored. If you have clearly defined benchmarks for brand practices and guidelines, track their use and reward people accordingly. To determine whether your brand is increasing in value through keeping the promise is trickier. External audiences will need to see the brand promise carried out multiple times in multiple different ways before they will begin to respond.
So how you do measure it?
Qualitative measures of brand value help companies understand external audiences’ brand associations, and quantitative research helps companies assess brand awareness, use, attitudes, and associations. Both research methods help companies determine whether the brand strategy is having the intended effect. Companies can also measure the overall value in their brands through assessing the discrepancy between the financial value of the company or product and the overall book or accounting value of the company or product.
