10 tips for a good Branding Strategy

Powerful brands don’t just get created overnight. They need careful long-term planning, assessment and execution of an up-to date branding strategy. A powerful branding strategy influences the way in which your consumers think and in turn respond to your brand.

Here are ten tips on how to build and communicate a good branding strategy for your business:

1.  Identify and analyze the differentiators and advantages your brand has over your competitors.

The first step for a business is to identify your key strengths. Then determine the potential competitors through various internal and external researches and target-market analysis. Then list and analyze their advantages and the key features over your products and services. This will help you to get an insight about your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, how the target market perceives your competitor and the competitors’ relevance to your target segments.

2.     Evaluate your advantages and find effective ways to communicate your brand promise.

Rigorously evaluate your core advantages and ensure they are a perfect fit in the target market. Advertising through the traditional media such as television, radio and print are obviously the most popular mediums to get the spread the word about your brand. But with technology and internet playing a major roles in our lives these days, it’s advisable to use the online medium to reach your target audience, being more targeted it turns out to be more cost effective. Also think of other out-of-the-box ideas, which align with your brand’s promise to promote the brand. Such ideas usually create brand recall in the minds of the consumers.

3.     Embed your value proposition in all your business process.

The consumer will believe your brand image only if your brand’s image is aligned to your brand’s positioning and they’re able to see it at every point that they come in contact with your brand, be it your marketing, pricing, point-of-sales or after sales service. Thus, your brand proposition not only needs to be reflected in your logo, brand name and tagline but also needs to be embedded into the mind-set of your employees right from the lowest level to the top most level in every business process.

4.     Do as you say.

Your brand’s positioning is more than what your product or service is about or how unique it’s, or what stance you want to take in the market. Your brand-positioning message should convey to the consumers the kind of relationship you want to have with them or how and when you want them to remember your brand.

This can only be done if you repeatedly and constantly do what you say. For example, if you’re a business, which portrays that the customer is king for you, then you need to ensure that a customer can have access to you 24/7.

5.     Know your customers’ value and check for Brand compatibility

From a business’ point of view it’s important to know various aspects of the customer’s behavior in your target market. Like, how often does he purchase an item in your segment, how much does he spend in that segment, how often and how much is he spending on your product or service, is he a loyal customer, does he pay full price or does he purchase during discounts.

This information helps you to gain sizeable knowledge of your consumer’s mindset, purchase environment, purchase behavior and requirements. This in turn can help you gauge the compatibility between your brand’s value propositions and his buying behavior, which in turn helps you figure out how much to spend on which customer.

6.     Invest in knowing more about your customer.

Make sure you’re constantly listening to your consumers, because consumers are always trying to talk to you. Don’t just stop at listening,  observe them in their daily lives, you’ll find many clues about consumer behavior, which you many not find through focus groups. There are many research agencies that can help you with this.

7.     Connect. Respond. Involve.

With multiple channels opening up for the consumer, they can now influence the brand’s image either positively or negatively. Consumers expect you to respond to their comments and queries, solve their problems as soon as possible and provide them with an explanation for the flaws /defects in your products or services.

With communication between consumers and brand continuously growing, many companies are now using creative means such as crowdsourcing to involve the consumer in the brand’s marketing and promotional schemes .

8.     Evolve or Die

Over a period of time, the mind set of the consumers change. Your branding strategy too needs to evolve accordingly for your brand to stay abreast of these changes. By updating your packaging, communication and if need be, the core philosophy of the brand from time to time, you can keep your brand’s value proposition and image aligned with the changing consumer’s mindset. For example: RIM failed to listen to it’s consumers and evolve with the changing market trends, as a result it lost market share left-right and center and is now fighting an uphill battle to capture back its market share.

9.     Focus is key. 

While budgets are getting smaller and competition is getting tougher, it’s important not to lose focus on the branding strategy and the goal you’re trying to achieve through that strategy.

10.  It takes years to build trust and only a moment to destroy it.

Sales of companies like Cadbury and Toyota took a huge hit, when a worm was found inside a Cadbury Dairy milk packet in India and a global recall of cars by the later. Restoring the consumer’s faith in a brand requires huge amounts of investment, thus it’s essential to deliver on the brand’s promise in the first attempt. The most successful brands around the world always go an extra mile to deliver on their promises and then brag about it.