Six steps to get your brand strategy working

One of the ‘mic drop’ moments in a Brand Arrow workshop comes when I ask: who is the most important audience for your brand strategy? Customers? No. It’s your team. If they understand your brand, there’s a good chance your customers will too. If they don’t, what hope do your customers have?

Because even the best brand strategy means nothing if your team doesn’t understand it — or isn’t given the tools to put it to work.

That’s why I always check in with clients after we’ve developed their brand strategy to see what’s changed. In most cases, the evidence is clear in how the brand is presented and developed. But occasionally, I’m surprised by how little has changed. Given the time, effort and money invested, I’ve often wondered why.

So, how do you make sure your brand strategy doesn’t gather dust on a shelf, but gets put to work delivering greater clarity, differentiation and direction for your business?

1. Give someone responsibility for driving it

Brand strategy is a whole-company strategy, not a marketing strategy. But marketing is often a good place to drive its adoption. It is responsible for much of the organisation’s communications, has budgets and typically engages with most departments.

That doesn’t mean marketing owns the strategy. It means someone has responsibility for maintaining momentum and making sure it doesn’t get lost amongst business as usual.

2. Create shared ownership of implementation

If you’ve co-created the strategy, don’t lose that shared ownership when it comes to implementation.

For example, in developing your vision you may have identified barriers preventing you from getting there. Who is responsible for addressing each one? What needs to happen and by when? Agree responsibilities and timelines, then set dates to check progress. Different people need to own the parts they can influence.

3. Take it out into the organisation

You’ve co-created your strategy with a group of people. Now share it with the wider organisation — and not simply by presenting a PowerPoint.

Give people the opportunity to respond to it, kick the tyres and explore what it means for them. I’ve found workshops particularly effective. Take your value proposition, for example, and ask: How do we make our differentiation explicit to our customers? What would we need to do differently? It makes the strategy real and gives people an opportunity to understand and own it.

4. Make it easy to access and understand

People can’t use a strategy if they don’t know where to find it.

I call mine a Positioning and Messaging Guide — slightly boring, I know — but it has a practical job. It brings together everything people need to understand and apply the strategy: vision, positioning, audiences, benefits, values, key messages and tone of voice. It becomes a reference point people can keep coming back to.

5. Use it to make better decisions

Your strategy should become a benchmark for everyday decisions.

Values are a good example. Internally, they help your team understand what is and isn’t ‘on brand’. Externally, consistently demonstrating them creates hallmarks customers begin to recognise you by.

Does this initiative reflect our values? Does it amplify our positioning? Does it deliver the benefits that matter to our customers? Does it move us towards our vision?

That’s when strategy becomes a practical decision-making tool.

6. Make those decisions visible

Use your new brand strategy as a lens to audit what you already have.

Look at your products and services, sales messaging, website, customer communications and recruitment. Ask: What would we need to change for someone to see evidence of our brand strategy here?

Sometimes it might mean changing a few words. Elsewhere it could mean changing how you sell a service. Occasionally it could mean a new website or something more fundamental. Then come back six months later and look again. Can you see the evidence?

A good brand strategy represents a significant investment in making important choices about the future of your brand. Creating it is only the first part of the job. The return comes from putting those choices to work.

If you’d like to explore how The Brand Arrow can help define your point, and support you in implementing your brand strategy reach out to me directly 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.