Brand Strategy Works When You Put it To Work: Here’s the Proof.

My last blog looked at how to put a brand strategy to work. This time, I want to look at what happens when you do.

A good brand strategy brings greater clarity, differentiation and direction to a business. Put it to work and those benefits can translate into something tangible and measurable: greater visibility, stronger engagement, increased sales and business growth.

Here are four examples from Brand Arrow clients where putting their brand strategy to work has delivered clear, measurable results.

Blue Yonder: Becoming a retail leader

Blue Yonder used machine learning and AI to predict customer demand with remarkable accuracy. But it was presenting its capabilities across multiple sectors, making it harder to communicate where it could deliver the greatest value.

The business made the smart decision to focus on retail. But simply targeting retailers wasn’t enough. In an inward-looking market, Blue Yonder needed to stop looking like a data science business selling into retail and start behaving like a retail brand.

That became the focus of the brand strategy: weaving Blue Yonder into the fabric of the retail market.

The emphasis moved away from “leading data science” and towards the practical solutions and commercial benefits its technology delivered for retailers. That shift shaped its messaging, imagery and visual identity and made its marketing more relevant to the people it wanted to reach.

Its first demand-generation campaign exceeded its KPIs by 400%.

Blue Yonder’s success ultimately led to its acquisition by JDA, which subsequently adopted the Blue Yonder name.

World Extreme Medicine: Uniting a complex global brand

World Extreme Medicine is a genuinely distinctive organisation. It offers the world’s first MSc in Extreme Medicine, runs global conferences and delivers specialist courses led by more than 200 medical experts.

But the breadth of what it offered had become part of the problem. Its different services weren’t held together by a clear, consistent idea. The message had become muddled and the website difficult to navigate.

The brand strategy centred the organisation around one powerful thought: pushing boundaries.

That idea brought its different services together, simplified how the organisation presented itself and created a much clearer and more distinctive story.

Following implementation, memberships increased by 68%, website traffic rose by 40% and course enrolments increased by 7%.

Acin: Creating a category

Being first to market sounds enviable. But it comes with a challenge: if potential customers don’t know that a solution exists, they won’t be looking for it. That was the situation facing Acin.

Financial institutions had long used sophisticated data science to manage financial risk. But operational risk – the risks arising from systems, processes and people – was still being managed far more qualitatively.

Acin had developed an innovative platform to change that. But having a new solution wasn’t enough. It needed to create the language around a new category, explain a complex proposition simply and give potential customers a compelling reason to engage.

The brand strategy gave Acin the clarity and messaging to do that.

Following its implementation, Acin’s revenue increased by 300%.

Code Red: Reaching the top 3 on Google

Getting attention in cybersecurity is tough. It’s a crowded market where many businesses appear to offer similar expertise and make similar claims. Code Red needed to become clearer, more distinctive and easier to find.

Brand Arrow worked with the business on its name, proposition and complete rebrand, creating a clearer position and the messaging and identity needed to communicate it consistently across its website and marketing. The results were immediate and measurable.

Organic search traffic increased by 130%. The company’s Google ranking rose from outside the top 100 to second place. Time spent engaging with the website increased by 32%.

Strategy creates the potential. Implementation creates the value.

Four Brand Arrow clients. Four very different businesses. Four very different challenges. But the same lesson: brand strategy works when you put it to work.

To explore how a brand strategy could deliver measurable results for your business, drop me a line at bruce@thebrandarrow.com.

I’m now celebrating my 17th year running my Brand Strategy consultancy, as well as regularly speaking at conferences and lecturing at business schools, I teach brand management on the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s diploma course and am an accredited speaker with the Vistage CEO network.