Brand Strategy: How to Build and Grow Your Brand

Think about golden arches, a swoosh, or a partly-eaten apple. What are you thinking about next? If your mind says McDonald’s, Nike, or Apple, that’s a great brand strategy in action. Even the slightest thought of their imagery will conjure up the entire brand in your mind.

As a business owner, you might be thinking: how can my brand be like that?

The answer lies in a solid brand strategy. A clear, intentional strategy sets the stage for a brand that captures attention and builds loyalty. And that’s exactly what we’re about to learn here.

Let’s take a look at what you’ll learn today:

• A refresher on brand strategy and its essential underlying concepts
• Elements of your brand strategy and the framework to use
• Ways to identify branding trends
• Tips to build brand equity

We’ll discuss what a brand strategy is and get into why it’s important, how to construct a brand strategy, and how to build brand equity.

Let’s start with a refresher on brand strategy.

What Is Brand Strategy?

Brand strategy is the sum total of your approach to making your brand identifiable and favorable among your customers and potential customers. If your brand is a billboard, then your branding strategy is the pole that props it up for everyone to see. A great brand is nothing without a good strategy because you’ll have issues getting people to see and know it in the first place.

I understand that all this talk about branding and brand strategy could be overwhelming. But I’m here to help. To get a proper grasp on this topic, you’ll need a good understanding of the underlying concepts.

Let’s take a look at some key concepts in branding:

Brand Strategy

Brand strategy is the approach your business takes to connect with your audience, whether it’s through messaging, positioning, or personality. It’s the big umbrella that covers all other concepts in this section.

Brand DNA

Your brand’s DNA is what lies within your brand’s core. It’s the most basic building block of your brand, so we’re talking about its core values, purpose, vision, and mission.

Brand Identity

Your brand identity is how the brand presents itself to the world. That means this is one of the essential pieces of your branding strategy. A brand identity generally includes its story, personality, visual presentation, and communication style.

Why Is Brand Strategy Important?

Brand strategy is important because, simply put, perception is reality. A brand strategy gets your product in front of the customers’ eyes. And if you don’t have a brand strategy, they may not see your product, meaning your product might as well not exist to them.

A good brand strategy makes your company stand out among the crowd. It increases the likelihood of your brand being seen by customers, which could lead to purchases. Good brand strategy also builds your brand’s identity, like how people who see golden arches think of McDonald’s and how a partly eaten apple makes people think of Apple. Good brand strategy helps you make these associations in the minds of your audience.

How Brand Strategy Helps Entrepreneurs

As I mentioned above, a good brand strategy gets your company seen by potential customers. However, brand strategy also has another benefit: it becomes your roadmap. Creating a brand strategy will encourage you to get in touch and understand your business values and purpose, which will be your guiding light every time you don’t know how to proceed.

A strong brand strategy means you have your business values and purpose down pat. Even though decision-making can be tough, you’ll be doing so knowing exactly what your business needs and values.

Building Your Brand Strategy

Now that you’ve learned what brand strategy is, it’s time to keep going down this road. What’s next?

It’s time to build your brand strategy. First, we’ll take a look at exactly what makes up your brand strategy, then we’ll put it all together. Plus, I’ve got three great tips to grow your brand even further!

Elements of Your Branding Strategy

Before we build the house that is your branding strategy, you need to know the building blocks first. So, let’s take a magnifying glass to each element of your branding strategy and get to know them better.

Purpose

Your brand’s purpose is pretty self-explanatory: why does your company exist (beyond profit)? This is the very core of your brand, its raison d’etre, if you will. Here are a few examples of brand purpose statements to help you start brainstorming:

• Google: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and helpful.

• Ben & Jerry’s: To make the best possible ice cream in the nicest way possible.

• Duolingo: To make education free and accessible to all.

Brand purpose statements are usually short, sweet, and to the point. You don’t need to outline everything in this one statement because you can clarify this statement further in the subsequent elements.

Vision

You’ll likely derive your brand’s vision from your purpose statement. It’s your brand’s purpose refined into a more tangible, reachable goal.

A good way to define your brand’s vision is to ask the question, “What do we want to achieve, and what will success look like?” For example, LinkedIn’s vision is “to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.” This is their primary goal, the guiding light that informs whatever they do as a business. Having a strong, well-defined vision will guide your decisions and innovations.

Mission

Next comes your brand’s mission. Your brand’s mission is your focus and commitment to the present. For instance, TripAdvisor’s mission statement is “To help people around the world plan and have the perfect trip.” A mission statement typically will guide your day-to-day business processes.

Values

Brand values put your brand identity and beliefs into words. Values are usually visible in how your brand communicates with the audience, and they may understand it even if you don’t explicitly say what your values are. What do you think of when you hear somebody say LEGO? You may think of playfulness, creativity, imagination, or something along those lines. That’s by design because creativity, fun, and imagination are part of the company’s values.

Positioning

Brand positioning is how you want your brand to be perceived by the customer and the audience at large. In branding, it’s best to be something for someone instead of being everything for everyone. When you write your brand positioning statement, be concise and make sure to account for your audience, what makes your brand different, and what value you offer.

Your brand positioning statement can be written however you want, but here’s a Mad Libs-style formula to help:

“For [Target Audience], [Brand Name] is the only [Your Market] that [Differentiation] because [Proof Point].”

Personality

Brand personality “humanizes” your brand and makes it more relatable to the audience. It’s especially helpful to draw in potential customers who share those personality traits. For example, luxury brands like Chanel present a sophisticated, charming personality and show it in how the brand communicates through its marketing, like capitalizing on its elaborate fashion shows and working with celebrity spokespeople. In general, Chanel presents itself as a brand that the rich and famous use and sells the notion that by using Chanel products, you can be like them.

One of the easiest ways to define a brand’s personality is to imagine if it were a person. If your brand was a person, how would they be, and how would they act? Let’s say you have an education technology company. Your brand person may be rational, witty, and analytical and interacts with their audience like a teacher or an older sibling.

Voice

The brand voice is a further derivation of the brand’s personality. It defines how your brand communicates in all your communications. The brand voice will differ depending on what your company focuses on. A brand selling suits and dresses for well-off people would communicate differently to a brand selling clothes for young skaters, for instance.

Story

Humans are naturally drawn to stories. A brand story is part of the intangible offering of a brand, making the customers feel something. Your brand story is one of the best vehicles to show your customers what your brand is all about while building trust and loyalty at the same time.

However, the brand story isn’t about selling products or services. It’s more about making the customers feel. If your brand story makes them feel something, then the customers are more likely to remember your brand. A good example is Airbnb’s “Made Possible by Hosts” campaign, which highlights the experiences of its customers while staying at Airbnb to elicit feelings of nostalgia and the desire to travel.

Brand Strategy Framework

We’ve got the blocks; now it’s time to build the house. Here’s your guide to building your brand strategy:

Uncover the Brand Core

First things first, you need to know what your brand is. Before proceeding further, you need to identify and define your brand’s purpose, vision, and values to understand what your brand stands for.

Develop Buyer Personas

Knowing your audience helps you create tailored communications that fit their preferences and needs. To do that, you can make buyer personas to represent your customer base and get insights into their desires.

Analyze Competitors

You’re probably not the only company selling what you sell. Research your competitors and identify market gaps so you can position yourself there and gain an edge on them.

Differentiate and Define Market Position

Differentiation makes you stand out. Position your brand based on what your audience needs and carve out a unique niche in the market. Then, define your market position by clarifying what the brand offers, to whom, and why it matters.

Align With Archetypes and Shape Brand Personality

Humans like to put things in neat little boxes, and that’s what you can use to your advantage. Once you have your positioning and differentiation, you can start categorizing your brand into one of the twelve brand archetypes.

Chosen your archetype already? Then, you can develop it into a more fleshed-out brand personality that feels realistic and relatable.

Establish Voice and Tone

Once you have the personality, then you can create the brand’s voice and tone that fits it.

Craft Messaging and Storytelling Frameworks

Good brands know what the audience desires and offer to solve their problems. Once you have the audience’s needs and problems identified, start making a messaging framework to address those.

Branding is also about making the audience feel, so start crafting narratives and stories that make people feel. Whether it’s nostalgia, joy, or excitement, eliciting strong feelings is a good way to ensure your brand sticks in their minds.

Design Visual Identity

Visual branding and imagery is important because that’s how a lot of branding communication is done. So, translate your entire brand’s essence into visuals that accurately represent it.

Define Marketing Plan

Last but not least, you need to know how to deliver the message. That’s where the marketing plan comes in.

Growing Your Brand: The 3 A’s

Once you have your brand going, naturally, you’ll have to grow it eventually. Having a stagnant brand means you might be left in the dust by competitors who aren’t afraid to keep growing.

So, how do you grow your brand? You use the 3 A’s:

Awareness

Naturally, the first thing to do is to make people aware of your brand. You can do this by launching marketing campaigns and using your various channels to reach the audience. I can’t understate the importance of an active social media presence and good utilization of digital channels here.

Every single step after this hinges on people knowing your brand exists. If nobody knows your brand exists, they probably won’t even think about your brand when they plan to buy goods or services.

Affinity

Once people know your brand, it’s time to draw them in further into the affinity territory. By leaving good impressions about your brand through top-of-the-line products and services, you’ll encourage customers to keep coming back. When customers have consistently great experiences engaging with your brand, they’ll likely be loyal to your brand.

Advocacy

Loyal customers can then eventually become your evangelists. This means they may organically recommend your brand to people in their social circles without you needing to hire them as influencers. However, you can still nudge loyal customers into becoming advocates through incentives and referral programs.

Identifying Branding Trends That Work for Your Business

The branding and marketing landscape is an ever-changing field where trends come and go. This can be a double-edged sword since blindly following social media and popular culture trends can dilute your brand, while doing nothing at all with your brand for a long time can make your brand look static and isolated.

So, how do you identify trends that work for you and skip the ones that might not work for you? When you see a trend that you want to jump on, ask yourself these three questions:

Does This Trend Connect to My Brand Meaningfully?

Your audience is likely smarter and more perceptive than you think. Most of them can sense whether a brand is genuinely trying to connect with their audience through trends or just hopping on a shiny new thing without consideration of how it connects to the audience.

So, when you see a trend coming, think about how you can make the trend relate to your business values and, in turn, how you can use the trend to make a meaningful connection with your customers.

Are We Too Late to Jump On This Trend?

Some trends stick around for months, some last for just a couple of days. Before jumping on a trend, take a look and get a good feel of where it is in its lifecycle. If you’re riding on a trend once everybody has gotten on it, you’ll be lost in the shuffle and be one brand in the sea of dozens.

Think about whether a trend is already played out or if there’s still mileage on it before you capitalize. You should also think about the time needed to create materials and posts that capitalize on that trend because, by the time you finish creating the post, there’s a chance that the trend has already played out.

Are We Jumping On the Bandwagon Or Taking the Lead?

Many brands try to jump on trends and become lost in the shuffle of samey content. That’s usually what happens when brands are reactive. Instead, consider being proactive and predicting trends ahead of time.

It’s a good idea to have a calendar of cultural events coming up in the year, like big movie or show premieres, awards shows, and sports events. By planning things out ahead of time, your brand can be conversation leaders instead of simply trend followers.

Building Brand Equity

Brand equity is why people prefer more expensive brand-name items over more affordable non-branded products. The more people see a brand’s worth and perceive its value, the more likely they are to pay higher prices for them.

But let’s take a look at what brand equity is first before we jump into how to build it.

What Is Brand Equity?

Brand equity, boiled down, is the perceived value and quality of your brand as seen by your customers. It’s a combination of brand awareness and reputation, and it’s usually the primary driver of customer loyalty.

Here’s an easy example to help you understand how brand equity works. Let’s say you’re looking for basketball shoes. In front of you are a pair of Nikes and a pair of shoes from a brand you don’t recognize. Which one would you choose? If you prefer Nike over the other brand, then that’s brand equity at work. You recognize Nike as a trusted brand and are more likely to purchase it, even if the Nike shoes are more expensive than the other pair.

How to Build Brand Equity

As a business owner, you’re probably starting your brand from the ground up. Nobody knows who you are, and you don’t have the years of history and recognition that other brands have. How do you even start building your brand to measure up to them?

Here’s how:

• Build brand awareness: People won’t love your brand if they don’t know who you are. The first thing you should do is build brand awareness by providing excellent value, having a great digital presence, and building a consistent brand image. In some cases, you can partner up with bigger brands to enhance awareness.

• Communicate what your brand stands for: When people already know your brand, it’s time to communicate what your brand values. People are more likely to relate to these values when they already appreciate your products.

• Foster customer loyalty: Lastly, you need to build customer loyalty. Loyal customers won’t just repeatedly purchase your products, but they may also become your brand ambassadors, spreading the good word about your brand to others in their social circle. To help with this process, you can try implementing referral programs or other incentives.

When you boil it down, the best way to build brand equity is to make a product that customers love and turn that satisfaction into an affinity for your brand. That means putting customers at the heart of everything you do. When the customer feels like they’re appreciated, they’ll likely be more loyal to your brand and become evangelists without being prompted.

Conclusion

Brand strategy is like a map. You can travel fine without it, but there’s no guarantee that you can reach your intended destination. You might reach your intended destination, but there may be time- and money-consuming detours along the way. Either way, it’s important to have a brand strategy when building your brand to ensure it grows the way you want it to.

Real quick, let’s get over what we’ve learned:

• You’ve learned what brand strategy is, why it’s important, and how to build a brand strategy.
• You’ve learned how to identify trends and determine whether it’s relevant to your brand before jumping on them.
• You’ve learned what brand equity is, how it benefits you, and how you can build it.

If you haven’t made a brand strategy yet, it’s time to get started. Start by identifying the core of your business and continue following the steps we’ve covered before until you have a tried-and-tested brand strategy.