Brand strategy, like most phrases that end in ‘strategy’ (‘marketing’, ‘channel’, ‘social media’), is that regular business contradiction: a common term that’s rarely understood.
But seeing as brand strategy sits plumb in the middle of what we do, we’re going to explain what brand strategy means to us at Woven and how we go about doing it.
The first part of which is actually very simple.
So what is brand strategy?
We define brand strategy as the process of building a brand that achieves your business goals, and it covers:
- The brand objective(s).
- The brand’s target audience.
- What it believes in.
- How it behaves.
- What it looks and sounds like.
- Where it needs to live (channel plan).
Remember, your brand must present you in most meaningful way to the most meaningful people — your employees, investors and, of course, potential customers. But what ‘meaningful’ means is what your strategy needs to define, starting with your objectives.
Brand strategy achieves business goals
The point of a brand strategy is to achieve a business need, so before anything else, your brand strategy needs a defined goal. The goal should be simple, measurable and agreed by all stakeholders from the beginning.
Examples of goals we’ve helped our clients achieve include:
- To broaden our offering to younger customers.
- To win more international clients.
- To better position the brand within the healthcare sector.
These are big, juicy objectives that guide all aspects of brand activity, from product development to brand design and business culture. But they’re also specific enough so that every decision we take as a brand engagement agency can tie back to it.
If that brand proposition isn’t going to help us appeal to the healthcare sector, then we rewrite it. If that logo isn’t right for a younger audience, then we redraw it.
Get a simple, clear definition of what you want your brand to achieve and you’ll be able to measure all subsequent work against it.
Defining your audience
Your brand strategy won’t succeed unless you have a clear idea as to who your brand is aimed at, so you also need to define who it is you’re appealing to.
- What’s their job title?
- What do they want to see and hear from you?
- What are their pain points?
- How do you help them feel good?
- What does success look like for them?
Crafting buyer personas is a big part of this, but don’t go down the usual route of grouping people by age, gender and economic background.
A successful brand strategy is less about demographics and more about psychographics. You need to align your brand to what your prospective customers want — and show how you can provide it. You need to know what’s pissing them off — and show how you can stop it. You need to understand the deep-seated, emotional benefit that they want from a service like yours — and tap into it.
Be a mirror to your audience and they’ll see themselves reflected in you, and be much more likely to choose you over the competition.
Speaking of which…
Sizing up the competition
Brand strategy should be informed by the business goals and the audience it wants to attract. But it’s also worth looking at the competition, for the following reasons:
- They might be doing something well that can inspire your own branding choices.
- They might be making mistakes you can avoid. (Better them than you.)
- You could map yourself against the competition to find gaps in the market — see ‘Dead Happy’ life insurance for a masterclass in this.
- So you don’t inadvertently rip them off. Copyright infringement doesn’t come cheap.
Giving your brand strategy some soul
Aligning with business goals. Understanding audience insight. Doing a competitor audit.
So far, so logical.
But as we know, buying decisions aren’t just born from logic, they’re fuelled by emotion.
A successful brand strategy taps into the emotions that inspire both the people behind the brand (its employees and investors) and the customers we want to attract to the brand.
You might call them ‘shared associations’ or ‘emotive drivers’.
But we call it brand soul: a foundational set of behavioural, visual and verbal rules that determine the brand’s personality in a way that connects brand to buyer. After all, isn’t successful branding about finding your kindred spirits — your soulmates?
We think so. And this soul-searching journey starts with finding your brand archetype.
The essentials of a brand strategy: brand archetypes
Think of your favourite stories. Chances are, the characters that power them fall into categories: the loveable rogue, the femme fatale with the perfect put-downs, the naïve youngster whose destiny is to change the world.
These are archetypes, characters defined by universally understood traits that quickly and clearly explain who they are and what motivates them.
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed these archetypes were familiar to all of us because they’re hard-wired into the human experience — a hard-wiring that doesn’t stop with stories, it extends to brands.
Brand archetypes — such as The Hero, The Caregiver, The Magician and The Explorer — are a powerful way to define your brand and position it in the minds of your audience. We use them at Woven as brand strategy tools to explore, craft and express a brand’s personality.
From tone of voice to typography, brand values to image choices, a brand archetype is a guiding star that helps marketing managers and creatives craft a consistent brand that resonates with its ideal audience.
As a brand strategy agency, we take them a step further. We use them to understand why the brand exists, to uncover its real purpose and proposition. We might, for example, position you as a Caregiver brand — but why, and what kind of Caregiver? This exploration gets us to the core purpose of the brand, which is then woven through its language, look and behaviours.
In that sense, the archetype is both an encapsulation of the brand and a springboard for further soul-searching that gets to the heart of why a brand really exists — and how it can really benefit its customers.
Mission statement
So, we have a brand goal and a brand archetype. Now we need some purpose.
Why should our customers or colleagues care about what we do? What makes us different from the rest? Why do we even exist?
Now, before we get too existential, a mission statement has a grounded, everyday purpose. In describing what a company does and how it plans to do it, a good mission statement:
- Gives focus to stakeholders by defining the business’s core objective(s).
- Guides strategic decision-making.
- Inspires customers to buy into the brand proposition.
- Helps shape company culture.
- Helps attract the right kind of colleague to the business.
- Makes the company accountable for the success — or failure — of its mission.
Not bad for the odd sentence or two.
But if that’s the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, what about the ‘why’? Well, that just takes a little vision…
Vision statement
A vision statement is the perfect future result of your mission. It’s the thing we’re all working towards — an ambitious target that might never be achieved but that always inspires us to try.
Less grounded than the mission, the vision is usually a pithier one-liner that serves as a rallying cry for everyone in the business. The kind of message you might put on your reception wall, in creative campaigns or across your website.
Visions are often more purpose-led, going beyond the everyday machinations of business and into the world-improving question: ‘Why are we here?’
Mission and vision statements: an example
Take a look at the following statements we crafted for Nolte Küchen (Germany’s leading maker of premium kitchens):
The mission: To make kitchens that look like a dream, work like a charm and feel like home.
The vision: To help everyone love where they live.
The mission reflects Nolte’s focus on elegant design, German proficiency and that ‘welcome home’ feeling their kitchens give you. While the vision takes the Nolte effect beyond just the kitchen and into the wider home.
These messages tell us about the business and their goals, but they’re also cornerstones of the brand strategy, helping to set the brand’s purpose, direction and creative execution.
In writing your own, you can apply the following structure:
We exist to [mission statement], so that in the future we will [vision statement].
Which sounds easy, but getting this right takes time, introspection and forward-thinking to best represent what you do and why you exist.
Brand values
Ah, the famed — and often maligned — brand values. Do they really matter? Aren’t they just an HR exercise?
No, they’re absolutely not.
Brand values are your culture. They’re what you believe in. They inspire business decisions, the people you hire, the customers you want to attract. They’re a link between brand and buyer, connecting with audiences in ways that go beyond the 4 marketing Ps.
And they’re not just internal things; they inform your creative, too. Spotify’s values of playfulness and innovation aren’t just buzzwords; they guide their entire brand behaviour, from the products they offer to the way they look and talk.
Creating your brand values
At the risk of developing a theme here, your brand values will reflect the people in your business and the people you want to attract to your business.
Just don’t make them generic. Nearly everyone — including Spotify — says that ‘innovation’ matters or that they’d be nothing without ‘integrity’. Instead of these obvious monikers, pick values that say something specific about the culture you want to build, the people you want to work with and the way you want to express your brand’s personality.
For our branding work with Sofitel London St James, a luxury hotel in SW1, we didn’t just say ‘We’re playful’, we said:
We like a little freak with our chic
And we supported that with rationale that explains why that value matters to Sofitel. Which went like this:
We appeal to the kind of guest who likes a little soul with their stay. The kind of guest who’s bored of the usual 5-star sameness and smiles from hotel colleagues that don’t quite reach the eyes.
We’re the hotel for guests who want great food, friendly service and an unpretentious place to just be themselves — whether that’s more chick, more freak or, like us, a bit of both.
This positions Sofitel as a different take on the usual 5-star luxury sector. A value like this doesn’t just tell people that Sofitel is a playful or different brand, the tone and the language proves it.
That’s what your values need to do — express who you truly are using language that shows rather than tells.
Brand proposition
The final piece of your brand strategy foundation is the brand proposition. This is the promise you make your customer — the reason why they should buy from you, as opposed to the competition.
Our brand proposition for Halstock, one of the world finest furniture makers and interior architects, was ‘We make any space a masterpiece.’ Combined with a brand position that champions creative thinking and exquisite craft, this proposition says to potential customers:
- We transform space.
- We rise to any challenge.
- We create enduring, timeless work.
The brand proposition answers the question: ‘Why should I choose you?’ And for a brand like Halstock, ‘Because we’ll turn your room or home into a masterpiece’ feels like a perfect response.
Brand personality: visual and verbal identity
Your brand’s archetype, purpose, values and proposition are in place. The soul is locked in. Now, it’s about giving your brand personality in a way that captures its soul — how it looks, how it sounds and how it connects with what your audience wants to see and feel from it.
At Woven, we do this in two ways: brand voice and visual style.
Your brand voice
This, in short, is your verbal personality, expressed through what you say and how you say it — the words and tone that reflect who you are and how you want your audience to see you.
In short, it’s knowing whether you say ‘How do you do?’ or ‘How’s it going?’
How you decide where you fit on the spectrum goes back to your mission, vision, values, audience and archetype. Consider these elements, what your brand really represents and who it wants to attract, and go from there.
At Woven, we break down brand voice into a few steps:
- A brand voice philosophy. A short phrase that sums up the aim of the copy. Recent Woven examples include writing with ‘smart energy’ and in a way that’s ‘caringly confident’. This is supported with rationale that explains what this phrase means and why writers should imbue it in their copy.
- Brand voice adjectives. A few ways to describe the tone of the copy. Your copy might be punchy, spiky, elegant, chatty, conversational — and the level to which you apply these adjectives will flex depending on the purpose of the copy.
- Writing rules. Some dos and don’ts that are less about the tone and more about the technicals and house style.
- Good vs bad examples. Most importantly, we show what good vs bad copy looks like and explain how we’ve applied the philosophy and writing rules.
The end result is a comprehensive document that helps writers create a consistent brand voice across the communications mix.
Your visual style
Just as what we wear says a lot about us as people, so a brand is appraised by its visual identity.
Remember, just as with your tone of voice, this identity is guided by the brand soul — mission, values, archetype, etc. A Hero archetype looks and sounds different from a Caregiver. A Jester different from a Ruler. And so on.
The audience, as ever, plays a big part here. What do they want to feel as a result of engaging with your brand? Reassurance? Intrigue? Joy? Inspiration? Understand what they want and create an identity that provides it.
At Woven, we combine brand soul and audience expectation to create a feeling that informs every design choice across colour, typography, photography, graphics and logo design.
Again, this is wrapped up in comprehensive guidelines to ensure the brand always looks at its best no matter where it’s seen.
As part of your brand strategy, these visual and verbal guidelines should then be rolled out across all brand assets, from PowerPoint templates to a new website, social bios to email signatures. (More on this below.)
Telling the world
Your brand now exists. You have a consistent, distinctive and relevant brand identity based on foundations that represent your values — and those of your target audiences.
It looks beautiful because it’s truly considered. It works hard because it understands its audience.
It’s now time to launch — which means a launch plan should be drawn up to timetable what assets will be needed (see list below) pre-, during and post-launch.
At Woven, our launch plans might look unglamorous but they’re simple and get the job done, outlining the when and where of the launch, budget attribution and the type of media involved at each stage (paid, owned, earned).
If you’re a bigger company, you’ll want to host an internal launch event, hosted by the senior stakeholders. They’ll explain the purpose of the rebrand, any new brand values and behaviours, and a reveal of its new look and feel.
Internal ambassadors could continue the job after the launch to make sure everyone’s aligned to the new brand and is using its assets correctly. This isn’t just a surface-level exercise; brand behaviours should be tied to performance reviews, job descriptions and when onboarding new employees.
To communicate the brand launch internally, you’ll want to consider:
- Stationery collateral.
- Presentation templates.
- Email signatures.
- Job starter packs.
- An intranet.
- Newsletter templates.
- Branded apparel.
- Signage.
- HR documentation.
- Training materials.
External launch
An external strategy isn’t just about getting the word out there, it’s about prioritising time and spend so that you reach the right audience in the right places — and make every penny of your marketing budget count.
You might also want to attribute goals to your campaign so you can measure its success. And while an uptick in web traffic, social following and lead generation are useful metrics, the most important is sales and brand awareness. (The latter of which we talk about here.)
A typical external brand launch will consider:
- Press releases to announce the new brand across industry publications.
- A creative campaign that conveys your brand purpose and proposition, aimed at the right people and seeded across the right channels.
- Such channels include social media, web, print, TV, radio, podcasts, YouTube — but don’t try and hit all of them. Focus on where your audience spends time; forget where they don’t.
- Emailers. Inform your existing customers and partners about the new brand. If relevant, offer them a brand-launch discount to win them over.
- Public relations. Pitch stories, interviews or guest posts to media outlets and influencers to generate media coverage.
- Attend industry events and trade shows to introduce your new brand to potential customers, partners and stakeholders.
As with any campaign, you’ll want to measure its effectiveness during its run-time to see if you need to tweak any creative assets to improve engagement, and when the dust has settled to see if you hit your targets.
Woven: your next brand strategy agency
We’ve been building brands for over twenty years, combining award-winning strategy and effective creative to make brands work beautifully.
This article shines a light on how we go about doing it — and can hopefully guide your own efforts.
But if you want to work together to build a brand that will work hard, look like a work of art and grow your business, we’d love to hear from you.
Check out our work here, and if it impresses, get in touch and we’ll be your next brand strategy agency.