A strong brand will help you sell more profitably. To sell more is simple, you just lower the price. Instead, selling more profitable is the foundation for long-term success and profitability since every percent we can increase the price means 8 percent on our bottom line. A second benefit is that a strong brand will create a relation between you and your customers that is hard to break.
It is important to remember – especially in B2B processes – that communication is only a small part of how you build a strong brand. The behavior of your products and of everyone in customer-facing roles are often much more important than mechanical communication to create the customer experience you want to achieve.
To build a long-term, strong brand, a number of steps need to interact with each other:
- The brand foundation – or Vision framework – which describes the strategic prerequisites for the brand and customer promise
- The brand platform, which describes how the company wants to be perceived by its target groups
- The brand delivery, or Communication platform, which describes what the company must do to be perceived the way it desires
The brand foundation
The brand foundation consists of Vision, Core values, and Purpose. This is the strategic base that all successful companies must have in place.
The brand platform
The brand promise is the attractive, relevant, and credible customer benefit that a company offers its target groups. The promise is a concise and clear statement, crystallized mainly from two ingredients:
- Positioning/Direction– a strategy aimed at owning a desired place in the target group’s mind. It is achieved by clearly defining the business category and which concrete and/or emotional customer benefit the company offers its customers.
- Personality/Distinctiveness – the company’s identity (visual and verbal) based on the character traits it wants to be associated with.
The brand delivery
No matter how attractive and relevant a promise is, it has little value if it is not delivered to the right target groups in the most effective (and attractive) way. Delivery happens in two ways:
- What we say – a strategy for how the company communicates with its target groups through mechanical channels like the web.
- What we do – a strategy for how the company acts and behaves in its customer interactions.
If you get these three parts aligned, creating a read thread from Vision to Customer experience, you have a great foundation for success. But then the hard part comes. You need to implement the strategic platform in the whole organization. Everyone must understand, and everyone must act in a way that builds our brand in a consistent way.
More about each step and the implementation in coming posts.
If you want to discuss how you build a strong strategic platform, just reach out to ulf@sfinxconsulting.se
