What is a Brand Strategy?

So you have an idea for a brand. Maybe you’ve seen an unmet need in the marketplace, maybe you feel passionately about delivering a superior product, or maybe you have an idea for something completely disruptive. Having an idea for a brand is just the first step of a long journey.

A brand is more than a cool logo and a website. A successful brand demands that you understand your target audience, that you’re delivering what they want, and that you continue to retain their loyalty. It may sound simple, but anyone who has executed a successful brand knows that this is easier said than done. To create a winning brand, you’ll need to nail down your objectives, your execution, and your retention for long-term success.

You’ll need a brand strategy.

What is a brand strategy?

A brand strategy is all of those components – your business and marketing objectives, your communications and creative brand expression, and your delivery and customer experience. They come together to form the plan that will ensure your business succeeds.

To understand the importance of a brand strategy, you need to understand how each element of a brand strategy informs and strengthens your business. Building one starts with knowing your category and audience, and ends with continuous development. A brand strategy helps you understand where you are, where you want to go, how to get on top, and how to stay there.

Download our guide: How to Build a Brand Strategy

Take a look at the main components of a brand strategy:

1. Target Audience

Who’s the main audience that you want to reach with your brand? Whose needs does it fulfill? What are your main competitors in the market and who are they going after? How does your Target Audience compare and contrast? Once you have an idea of who you’re serving, you’ll be better able to define where your brand should go and what you want it to do to serve people best.

2. Business Objective

Define what it is you want to accomplish with your brand. Do you want to grow distribution? Gain penetration? Drive market share? Figure out where you want to focus your efforts and what your main goal is. This step is key because it defines everything you do next to get there.

3. Marketing Objective

With your business objective defined, the next piece is to execute it through your marketing objective. What do you want your target to think and feel about your brand? And how will that help you meet your business objective? Start to think about how you want to drive your brand, as well as what your brand will do and say to make people interact with it.

4. Communications

Think about where you want people to see your brand, the sound of it, its tone of voice, its principles, and its drive. How will your brand position itself in market to meet people’s needs and achieve your business and marketing objectives? What does the creative look like? What media channels will you communicate in? And how will you ensure customer experience, customer service, and customer success blow everyone away? There are innumerable ways that people can interact with your brand. Communicate with them in a way that drives your marketing objective and propels business objective.

5. Continuous Evolution

Once you have all of these things together, keep a constant pulse on the market to look for opportunities to update or evolve. Just as times change, people change too. Think about how Weight Watchers evolved from calorie counting to healthy lifestyle, or how American Eagle went from selling polo shirts to crop tops. Consider how your brand may be subject to change over time, and how you will continue to stay relevant in the market.

Most importantly: planning a brand strategy doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You’ll need information to power your journey forward.

With ProQuo AI, you can have access to information that makes planning your brand strategy easier – from understanding where you stand among your competition, to daily updates on how people are thinking and feeling about your brand, to AI-powered brand guidance that tells you what to do and when to win.

Our Brand Management platform, powered by AI and our revolutionary 16 Drivers framework, makes building your brand strategy easier.

Interested in learning more about how to build a brand strategy? Take a look at our full e-book, “How to Build a Brand Strategy,” for a comprehensive guide on everything you need to know to make your brand a success.