How to define “brand strategy”
We encounter the term “brand strategy” in just about every brand discussion these days, but what does “brand strategy” actually mean? How does it fit into that dynamic matrix that includes a company, its products, its brands and its customers? And what makes it “strategic”?
Brand strategy defined
As I see it, a company’s brand strategy describes how the brand intends to create customers. Specifically, it sets forth the creative, social and moral steps that the brand will take to create the customers that will drive the business forward.
“Creating customers” is a strategic act
“Creating customers” is a strategic act in itself. It is one reason why the “creating customers” approach to brands is so powerful. It is inherently strategic. It aligns company and customers in a shared context from the get-go.
The process by which a brand creates customers is outlined here and here.
What a brand strategy must include
To be effective, a brand strategy must include these qualities:
- It is value-based. It aims to deliver new forms of value that advance customers beyond the status quo, and beyond the reach of competitors.
- It innovates. It aims to deliver a new customer context, a new vision of what customers can be, and do—exclusively through the brand.
- It is structured as a platform. It’s goal is to make the brand a platform of new customer opportunities, a springboard for personal customer growth.
- It collaborates with customers. Brand strategy is a joint effort to free customers from current markets, illusions or fears that hold customers back. Customer energy magnifies brand energy.
- It’s an overt act of culture creation. A brand strategy aims to create a new culture of growth, initiative and discovery that raises customers to a new level. This is a new level that leads to profitable new markets for the company.
A brand strategy takes its direction from the brand mission. It includes the capability of brand vision, which is the ability to see your future through your customers’ eyes.
Many brands don’t have strategies
While there are a great many brands in the world, not all brands have brand strategies. Many brands are constructed as intense identities to be flogged by advertising campaigns, in which the “brand” operates as a stylized sales stimulant. Such brands are synthetic creatures of marketing and sales. They’re part of a persuasion package, and persuasion is not a strategy.
Companies can employ negative brand strategies
Certain companies may employ negative brand strategies that aim to limit and contain customers. Their goal is to use customers, rather than to create them as proactive brand partners. Often, these strategies result in brands of illusion that go medieval on their customers. They follow a brand agenda to keep customers weak, because they lack a strategy for dealing with proactive cultures—including those of their own employees.