Brand Strategy
What Is Brand Strategy?
We pride ourselves on delivering a big agency product with a small agency experience. Brand strategy services are critical to providing that level of value.
The best branding honors who you are today, but also charts a course for who you will become. It is a catalyst for growth, and the bridge that takes you from where you are to where you want to be. Branding crafts a strategy for success and builds assets to make it real.
In short, branding is not about communicating value; it’s about creating value. It is not what you make; branding is what you make possible. Brand strategy is the blueprint for success.
Brand strategy is the foundation of your brand—a definitive framework that concisely outlines your aspirational north star, why you exist, what makes you valuable, and how your brand will come to life in a compelling and actionable way.
In a crowded marketplace, a brand must differentiate itself or die. To stand apart from competitors, or better yet, stand alone as a category of one, a brand must understand itself fully and clearly broadcast its essence and offering to the world.
You can’t be a leader by following a leader.
Successful brands dance to the beat of their own drum—but as a real and genuine behavior rather than a “performance” to get noticed. The more your attitude feels fabricated or insincere, the less your viewers will be influenced by it.
How do you begin to do that? Brand strategy.
Why Is Brand Strategy Important?
Here at Helms Workshop, strategy informs everything we do. It serves as the foundation for all of our creative efforts, ensuring communications stem from and reinforce a singular, compelling idea.
It also builds a valuable manual for your company’s team to understand, share, and live the brand. Sometimes referred to as the brand’s Bible or “the Football,” brand strategy is our compass in defining, articulating, and growing the brand. Successful brand strategy charts a palpable connection across every touch point, from business strategy to brand guidelines.
Brand strategy services businesses’ myriad needs, both external and internal. It clearly defines core values, strengths, challenges, and opportunities in the marketplace. Great brand strategy draws a line in the sand and forces your team to make hard decisions and set strict goals. Who are you? What do you do? Why does it matter? What is your bulletproof argument that people should care? You must dig in and be unflinchingly honest about your value proposition and how you are different and better than your competition. A strong brand strategy agency knows that how you position your brand must be true and never fabricated. A brand is a promise. A good brand is a promise kept.
This doesn’t mean brand strategy cannot be aspirational—but it must be actionable. Effective brand strategy allows key decision-makers to help define the brand. It creates a consensus among all parties responsible for delivering brand messaging and driving the company forward. Everyone must be on board with that vision for brand strategies to work.
How We Build Your Brand Strategy
“The central problem of brand-building is getting a complex organization to execute a simple idea. - Marty Neumeier
Crafting brand strategy is an exercise in distillation. Our first step is to listen and learn. We ask questions, interview stakeholders, review past positioning, and analyze the competition. Our team dives deep to mine insights into what makes you, you. What is your most valuable asset as a business and a brand? That may be your provenance, story, legacy, culture, geography, culture, product, or any of the above. This discovery phase is our time to gather every nugget of information that could spark insights to bolster brand strategy. In this early work, before we create your brand strategy framework, we suspend judgment and fight to avoid taking anything at face value or jumping to early conclusions.
Once properly armed with an arsenal of information, we distill all ideas, attributes, and aspirations that define your brand into an actionable and comprehensive brand strategy. Your strategy should be as simple, concise, and brief as possible. If an element isn’t absolutely crucial to define the vision, it should be scrapped. In brand strategy, less is more. We take more time and effort to produce a strategy where every word carries weight.
“I apologize for such a long letter - I didn’t have time to write a short one.” - Mark Twain
To Commission, Or Not To Commission Research
Information and insight are the raw materials we use to build brand strategy. In brand strategy consulting, there is no such thing as too much information. Often, client partners come to the exercise with a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data. They understand their customer base and have a defined target audience. Their brand positioning statement rings true, aligning brand values and business goals. They understand their brand equity, and need help to build a brand that embodies and actualizes it for current and potential customers.
In those instances, we can employ that information as the genesis of our work, a springboard to launch our team directly into developing strategy and a strong brand identity. In other cases, client partners hold less information about their industry, audience, and competition. Those cases call for more profound research before we can get started.
Consumer and competitive research can take several forms and follow various processes. On the lighter side, desk analysis involves online exploration of industry articles, category growth reports, sales trends, and other data. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have commissioned studies: custom-facilitated exercises that range from surveys and focus groups to ethnographies and audience development. We can also purchase previous studies relevant to your brand and business. Regardless of the criteria, the goal is to enter strategy development as fully informed and knowledgeable as possible.
How to Use Market Research
A key aspect of making research useful is interpretation—how we analyze and activate the data we have in our arsenal. Consumer reports alone cannot drive or dictate brand strategy. The insight we collectively apply to the information should steer the path forward.
“If we had asked the public what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster ‘faster horses.’ ” - Henry Ford
Research represents a platform on which we begin to build brand strategy, not the strategy itself. Many brands have fallen prey to the perils of a brand or marketing strategy that blindly follows current trends and chases fleeting consumer preferences rather than building strategy around the attributes that make their product and brands unique, valuable, and special.
If you introduce something new to the world, people require time to understand and adopt the product or idea. When asked for a definitive choice, the average focus group will often choose a “safe” option— one that no one hates but no one loves, either. Human nature and perceived social pressure influence us to not rock the boat or stand out too much. It’s scary! So, the average focus group inevitably chooses the option that is acceptable to all and thus exciting to none. Do you want a brand that’s merely acceptable? This is where insight and vision are key. Research should inform your strategy but not define it.
“Following a recipe doesn’t guarantee a gourmet meal. We can’t rely on old case studies to answer new questions.” - Marty Neumier
Successful brands look at data within the context of what they have to offer and what they want to accomplish as a business. Top brands make decisions based on where they want to go rather than where everyone else has been. Following the status quo too closely guarantees that your brand will not make a seismic impact on your industry and consumers.
We can look at some of the best brands today for examples of this. Rx Bar, Tesla, Liquid Death, or even our own 99-Pack would never have made it through a focus group where subjects’ votes solely determined the path forward.
Actionable Visual Strategy: Eye Opening & Eye Catching
A sister exercise in our brand strategy process establishing a visual strategy. Designed collaboratively with our client partners, this part of the brand development process builds a guide that defines the playing field when we explore brand identity.
Employing a visual strategy gives our collective team some distinct advantages as we develop the brand as a whole. First, it allows us to clearly define critical attributes we want people to understand about the brand without reading a word or considering an interaction. Through the exercise, our team coaches our client partners on how we can deftly cue complex ideas and emotions instantly through elements like color, typography, illustration style, and more.
A paralell example of how the combination of aesthetic elements works to cue emotions can be seen in the field of architecture. Have you ever walked into a space and found it almost tells you how to use it? You might think this is a place to curl up with a book and a coffee, cozily by myself. In another space, you might feel the lobby is a perfect spot to order a Manhattan with friends. A tremendous amount of complex information is processed and understood in just a few seconds— because the architects have employed a visual strategy.
“Branding is the process of connecting good strategy with good creativity.” - Marty Neumeier
Visual strategy is a powerful tool for teaching our client partners how we can use design to inform, delight, surprise, and pique interest. It’s an eye-opening experience with an added bonus—it lets us forecast and discuss plans for what avenues we will explore in developing visual identity. As a result, our collective teams are 100% aligned as we develop your brand’s aesthetic building blocks and identify your brand voice.
Strategy Grows With You
As your business grows, your brand strategy should evolve with it. It’s good practice to reassess and adjust your strategy periodically. Myriad factors in your industry, economic conditions, popular culture, and more can be catalysts for revising your strategy.
In some unique cases, the unknowns outweigh the concrete knowns for a brand entering the marketplace. In these instances, brand strategists recommend developing an agile strategy—an abridged, malleable document that can be tested and changed as your team learns more from the market. Developed in compressed “brand sprints,” an agile strategy allows businesses to bet small and adjust on the fly to meet consumer needs effectively. We employ a similar process in developing marketing strategy.
“A great brand is a story that’s never completely told.”– Scott Bedbury
Are you a legacy brand that needs to reignite a conversation with your audience and gain new fans? Or a scrappy challenger brand hungry to grab market share and grow? Are you launching a unique product or service? Whether selling a tried-and-true product or forging an entirely new category, a bulletproof brand strategy will ensure your brand story and promise ring true across every touchpoint, element, and customer experience.
