Starting With Strategy
Hi Friends, Hope you’re all having a wonderful week!
In last month’s post, we looked at what a brand is & isn’t and touched on branding’s favorite buzzword—brand strategy.
As a quick refresher, brand strategy is the process of identifying where your brand, business goals, and customers’ needs overlap. You can then use those findings as the foundational elements to inform every aspect of your business.
But why is it so important to start with strategy?
Why not just create a logo from the get-go and then figure out the company’s strategy afterwards?
Consider This:
Would you buy all of the furniture for a new house before knowing the dimensions & floor plans of each room?
But what if you *really* love the look of all of the pieces and think they perfectly fit your style? Would you buy everything and then just hope it works in your space once move-in day arrives?
Designing brand elements without first developing a strategy is like decorating a house without a blueprint or floor plan. You may have an idea of the general layout you’re working with, but not the exact specifications of each room.
If you bought all of the furniture for your house before knowing the sizes & layout of each room, you might end up with furniture pieces that you love the look of, but don’t quite work in the space that you have. And if that’s the case, you have two choices:
Try to make things work the best they can and consider the final outcome “good enough”
Go out and get new furniture that will be a better fit for your space
With either of these scenarios, how much time, energy, and even money would have been wasted along the way?
Now what if all that time, energy, and money spent was for your business? Would you be willing to potentially risk wasting resources & hope that everything will fit your needs after the fact; or would you rather have a blueprint upfront to ensure what you’re investing in will be the best approach to support your goals?
The Strategy Process
So what does strategy REALLY influence anyway?
The short answer is: everything.
When starting the brand strategy process, we begin with identifying the “WHY” of your business. Why are you doing what you’re doing (and it’s always something deeper than the motivation to make money). Customers make purchasing decisions with the emotional parts of their brain and they want to connect with businesses that believe in the same things as them. They want to buy why you’re doing what you’re doing. Not just what you’re doing. They could easily go to a competitor for the “what”.
After we’ve identified your business “why”, we use the strategy process to dive deeply into these areas of your business:
Mission & Values
Market Research
Messaging
Visuals
Mission & Values
This is usually thought of as an internal exercise, but it’s still important to identify your company’s mission & values to solidify what your company stands for. You’ve likely heard corporate buzzwords like “vision statement”, “mission statement”, “value proposition”, or any other variation. While different textbooks may characterize these each a bit differently, they are all essentially different ways to specify: what your company stands for; what you do; who you help; and how you help them.
It’s basically the process of defining the reason why your business exists and why customers should care.
This is a critical step for your strategic foundation. Not only will it help align everyone within your company under the same goal, but it helps provide direction for what every department should be working towards & the values that need to be upheld along the way.
Market Research
Developing an intentional strategy will uncover an industry snapshot to help you determine where your business fits into the marketplace alongside your competitors, how to differentiate from them, and how to identify any gaps in the market that might make sense for you to fill.
If you didn’t start with strategy and created your visual elements before taking a look at the marketplace, you may miss out on key opportunities to take advantage of ways to stand out in your industry.
In addition to studying the market landscape, you’ll dive deeper into who your customers are, their likes & dislikes, insecurities, needs, where to find them, and so much more. This is a necessary step since it’s tough to send content out to the world if you’re not quite sure who you’re talking to. Which brings us to our next point….
Messaging
After you define who you’re talking to, you need to determine how to talk to them.
This is where you develop your brand voice—the way you’ll sound in messaging. Maybe you want to sound playful to appeal to a more casual audience, or educational to appear as an expert in your field. How you sound will vary based on who you’re trying to reach, and you won’t be able to find the right tone without first knowing exactly who you’re speaking to.
Another big facet within the strategy process is to identify what your audience wants to hear at the different stages of the sales journey—which is different than what you want to say. The goal with messaging is to connect with your customers & address their needs, not just talk at them about yourself.
Understand that what they need to hear will change at each step of the buying journey, and identifying what those steps are and what type of messaging to use at each phase is an absolute must. By starting with strategy, you can better anticipate your audience’s needs and can plan how to best meet those needs at each step of the way.
Visuals
And of course, strategy plays a huge role in defining the direction your brand visuals take. That includes everything from your brand fonts & colors, to imagery, and of course your logo (and more!).
Your visuals will be how you put everything together to communicate to your customers. If your brand voice is playful, you want branding elements that are equally playful. If your target market is men in their 40s, your branding elements will be vastly different than a company whose target market is women in their 20s.
Having a defined brand strategy before creating your visuals will give you that necessary blueprint into what styles will work best to help you achieve your goals—not just what looks good. Visual elements need to be treated as more than decoration, they need a purpose and a strategic role to help your audience connect with what you’re trying to tell them.
As Marty Neumeier said in his book, The Brand Gap, “...it takes more than strategy to build a brand. It takes strategy & creativity together.”
Just as you shouldn’t create visuals without first creating a well-thought out strategy, a brand strategy can’t succeed without creativity which includes the intentional use of visuals to help support what you are trying to achieve.
Strategy & Creativity can’t be an either/or situation in brand design. Both are vital to your business, but starting with strategy will help you determine who you are, who you’re talking to, how to talk to them, and how to best use visuals to bring it all together.
Think your company could benefit from developing a brand strategy?
Connect with us to chat about your project!