Business Tips from SCORE: How to build a brand strategy

What is a brand? It is how buyers and potential buyers view you, your business and the products and services you offer. Brands are perceptions, but they become facts in the mind of the consumers. Archer Malvo Ventures created a canvas to describe building a brand strategy much like Strategyzer undertook for building a business model. Here's what to think about when building a brand, according to Archer:

Customer/User insight. What do people think of the category your product falls into? Is it a luxury or commodity or something in between? How relevant are the needs, wants or desires for the product? Does it have a real impact on the buyers’ lives? What problems do the product or services solve? What is it the product or service does to improve the lives of the buyers?

What benefits do buyers see most valuable to them? Are the benefits both tangible and intangible? Some benefits are rational or tangible. Some are intangible.  And, what most strongly influences their decision to buy? Is it a price, quality, availability, reliability, or accessibility factor that drives buyers to make the decision to buy?

Competition. Who are the enterprise’s direct and indirect competitors? What defines them? Location, product/service offerings, pricing, availability? Are there any voids in the marketplace that are filled by others? What are the competitors’ differentiators and competitive advantages? Is there disruption in the product or service category? Is everyone who competes offering relatively the same product or service with minor differences or do one or two stand out by taking a different approach?

Company/Product/Service features. What is the simplest description of the product or service offering? Can it be easily communicated? Can the description include differentiators that create uniqueness in the mind of buyers?

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Values that the brand represents. How do the values of the founders influence the brand? They are primary to the development of a brand strategy. The values of the brand influence everything the organization does, how it interacts and communicates with customers and how they deliver solutions.  Examples of brand values are: transparency, authenticity, collaborative, fair, integrity, service-focused, knowledge, and lifelong learning. Think about your brand, what values are delivered when current or potential customers and users see the brand communicated?

Once the brand’s values are confirmed and communicated, the brand’s personality needs to be addressed. These characteristics are normally communicated as adjectives describing how it is to do business with an organization. For example: warm, open, friendly, knowledgeable, and quality conscious.

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Now that the parameters of the brand are defined it is important to create a Brand Positioning Statement. After all, that is what branding does. It positions the company, products and/or services in the mind of buyers so they see no suitable substitute for that offering.

There are five criteria that the brand positioning statement must have: importance, unique, believable, actionable and sustainable. To do that, the audience (target customers) needs to be clearly defined. Who are they, how do you describe them relative to their desires?

Description. What is, in the simplest terms, a description of the products or services the brand represents?

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Benefit. What is the unique selling statement that defines the product or services primary differentiators? When combined together with the people who represent the brand, what is its competitive advantage?

Proof. What is the primary rationale for a brand to exist?

Payoff. What is the ultimate emotional payoff for the customer or user? Does it answer the needs, wants and desires of the user?

Brand Essence. What is the core idea, defining concept or prime differentiator of the brand? Is it tangible or intangible? Is it attitudinal? Is it unique and clear and can be communicated in two to four words — “Performance improvement through training and measurement”.

After completing a product or service branding assessment, according to HingeMarketing, there are specific steps in developing a brand strategy:

1.  Look at your overall business strategy and identify what role your brand plays in engaging and retaining customers.

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2.  Clearly identify and define your customer base so that you design a campaign that reaches them where they are.

3. Develop the position you want your brand to hold in the mind of current and potential buyers — are they the go-to for information, for service or for solutions?

4. Develop your messaging so that is clear, succinct and memorable. Create a strategy that will make your message stick — as the Heath brothers defined in their landmark book, "Made to Stick".

5. Create a name, logo and tagline to connect with your target audience such that it has meaning for them, as well as creates a call to action.

6. Then and only then can you develop a concrete marketing strategy to include your social media, website design and collateral materials (traditional or digital).

Contributed by Marc L. Goldberg, Certified Mentor, SCORE Cape Cod & the Islands. www.capecod.score.org, capecodscore@volunteer.org, 508-775-4884. Source: A 10 Step Brand Strategy for Your Professional, www.hingemarketing.com 1/14/22, The Brand Strategy Canvas - Archer Malvo Ventures, Austin, Texas.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Cape Cod SCORE: How to build a product, service brand strategy