Brand Strategy

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Leveraging my experiences on working on iconic brand relaunches, I have distilled Brand Strategy into the following framework and school of thought.

I. The Best Product: The Foundation

Whether physical, digital, or service-oriented, the product is the reflection of a Brand’s ethos and its reason for existence. The product must deliver on the commitment that a Brand has declared to its customer in order to maintain trust and authenticity.

QUANTITATIVE

  • Define the strategic targets to be the best in your segment.

  • Long Tail Concept: is your product strategy at the head or at the tail?

  • Building out the lifecycle management strategy before the launch of the first generation to maintain competitive advantages.

QUALITATIVE

  • Built with passion.

  • Be unique with a purpose.

  • Beauty in design, execution, or usability.

  • The constant pursuit of excellence and improvement.

  • Framed with the mindset “build one less than demand.”

II. A Compelling Story: The Cultivation

The story animates your product and market space. Showing why your brand is relevant brings credibility to delivering on the commitment you have promised. Bring the customer and the public into your curated world.

Quantitative

  • What makes you technically on par with the competition and then where do you excel beyond them?

  • Where are the market, demographic, and cultural shifts? How do you address this to stay ahead of the curve?

QUALITATIVE

  • Provenance: why are you credible?

  • DNA and mission statement: this must be woven into everything you do.

  • Establish yourself as an innovator that can build on your history and stay ahead of the curve.

III. Focus on the Customer: The Purpose

A brand exists only because of its customer. Successful brands are trustworthy and also representative extensions of a customer’s personality. A tinge of aspiration and desire elevates a great brand from a good brand (of course careful not to breach the line towards arrogance).

Quantitative

  • Demographics and archetype: gender, income, geography, age, household size, education, spending habits, media consumption, and hobbies.

  • Their psychology: what values and mores do they hold and how do you resonate with them? You need to be aspirational and unique (a better version of themselves), but maintain a commonality with them.

  • Who or what influences the customer?

  • Customer segments: where are the growths, declines, and whitespace?

QUALITATIVE

  • Ethnography: who are they?

  • The value proposition: what is their pain and how do you solve it.

  • Create desire.

IV. Activation: Sales and Communication

This is the tactical and crucial channel of launching a brand. A whole industry is built around this, though you may not be an expert in this area, you must understand, high-level, these levers of executing/conducting the various marketing and sales strategies to bring your concept to market.

Quantitative

  • Price and marketing positioning: Where are the competition at? What is the customer’s willingness to pay?

  • Competition: who are the incumbents and the disrupters? What are their strengths and weakness and how do you add value to the crowded space?

  • Are you chasing market share or margin optimization? This will determine your sales and business model.

QUALITATIVE

  • Third party validation: unpaid advocacy builds trust.

  • Customer experience: curate the experience before, during, and after a purchase to keep the customer engaged.

  • Build an authentic digital experience.

  • Do not lose sight of the value of physical experiences.

  • Build out the go-to-market plan: how are you bringing/launching the product to market?

  • Build out the sale channel model: how are you selling?

  • Build out the marketing plan: how are you communicating who you are and what the product is to entice people (advertising can be housed under this as it is the delivery)?