Why you need a plan
If a brand’s strength comes from the perception it creates (more on that here), then it stands to reason that the perception can be affected by every interaction a customer (or potential customer) has with a it.
From seeing an advert, to reading a press article, visiting a store, viewing a website to picking up the phone, all of these experiences combine to create a brand perception.
So then the experience of these different interactions needs to be consistent. You need to ensure you’re not creating one perception with one experience, and another completely different perception with another.
But consistency is not always easy when so many different elements are involved. How do you create an experience that feels right every time?
You need a plan.
The plan is your brand strategy. It should be the glue that holds different parts of an organisation—and the different things they do—together.
Your strategy is the foundation of a brand. It should help everyone in an organisation know how to approach things so that they’re all creating the same perception.
It is the proverbial rudder that steers the ship.
Determining the right strategy isn’t always easy, but once the foundations of a brand are established it brings two main benefits. One, it should help to create a distinctive position that is different to the competition (read why that’s important here), and two, it becomes much easier to know how to approach business activities (from hiring to marketing) so that they are joined up and reinforcing the perception. (An added bonus is that if you work with external agencies you can write much stronger briefs—and hold work to account more easily—once you know what you are, and aren’t about).
It’s worth remembering your strategy shouldn’t just be a collection of buzz words, or claims that sound good. There’s no point in having a plan if it can’t (or won’t) be adopted by a whole organisation.
Exactly how much time an effort you should put into your brand obviously depends on the specifics of each organisation and market. And it’s important to get the balance right. As having a plan that is too complex can be just as useless as having no plan at all.
If that all seems a bit shrouded in mystery, another way to think of the make-up of a brand is like a person. If you start on the outside and work inwards, you can think of their appearance as their visual identity, the way they speak as their tone of voice and how they act as their behaviours.
Until we get to know someone really well, these are the three main things that will determine our impression of them.
In a person these outward expressions (for want of a better word) are shaped by their values, principles and the life goals that are important to them.
The structure of a brand is broadly the same, (except that to create it you start from the inside and work out).
The foundations of a brand—whatever they may be—should drive it forward, shaping the things it does and the way it does them. They should help determine where to focus energy and crucially what is ‘on brand’ (which is really just another way of saying ‘is what we’re doing here creating the right perception’).
I’m not saying it’s easy—but it is important if you want to build a stronger brand than the competition.
I hope that makes a bit more sense of a process that can sometimes sound a bit smoke and mirrors. If you’ve any questions or thoughts, or if you’d like me to cover another topic, feel free to drop me a line here.
This is the last part of my brand fundamentals series If you’ve missed them you can also read about: