Your messaging needs to be relevant and it needs to be different!

Brand Strategy. The key to getting your messaging right!

Getting the message right for any brand is of course very important, and especially challenging for those with inherently complex messages. In this two part series, I’m going to look at how you can use brand strategy to define and then structure your messaging so that the point of your brand is crystal clear.

You need to be relevant

“Just what is your problem” might sound like the start of an argument but it’s a very healthy way to begin to think about creating messaging because you are asking what is the problem that I can solve for my customer.

This may seem like an easy question, but it really isn’t, because your customers may have lots of problems – however, for the brand strategy to work, we need to identify an overarching problem that all your customers face.

Why? Because you only have one brand, and that one brand needs to be relevant to all your customers.

Once you have captured the problem, you can then describe how you are going to solve the problem. That makes you relevant. And for each of these two questions, you need to be able to answer them with a single sentence.

In effect, you are saying to the customer, the brand knows what your problem is and can solve it, are you interested?

Once you have done this, the task of deciding how to structure your messaging hierarchy – in effect, what you say first and what you say second – is made easier because you are now responding to the problem you have told your customer you can solve.

But you need to be different too

However, it’s not enough just to be relevant, you also have to be sufficiently different from other brands wanting a customer’s attention. If every brand was as relevant as the next, then how would a customer be able to discern why they should choose you?

Ask yourself what makes your brand better qualified to meet their needs and what makes it more relevant than your competitors. What makes your product different, do you have any processes that are distinct in the market or especially important to how you operate, or a particular culture or organisational structure?

So, when expressing how you are going to solve the customer’s problem, you need to include the element that makes you different or distinct from everybody else.

Once you have defined why your brand is both relevant to customers and different from the competition, you’ll be in the perfect place to develop a message hierarchy and that’s what we will cover in the next blog, or if you just want to get on with it - you find it here.

I regularly speak at conferences, business schools and facilitate workshops on the subject of brand strategy. I’m also the author of the award-winning book ‘What’s Your Point?’ which can be purchased from Amazon.