When faced with the task of building a brand, there are key priorities that need focusing on to ensure your methods are both robust and viable. Organisations that are keen to expand on their brand or brand portfolio should regularly assess the manner in which all these priorities are being met.
1. Understanding the brand’s value
An over-obsession with finance, especially if this focus is driven by short-term financial concerns, is a common theme among organisations that fail to grow their brand. Media presence peters out, with these organisations preferring to prioritise tactics and resource issues, but failing to account for any longer-term objectives in building brand assets.
2. Establishing a captivating vision
Your brand’s vision needs to come with a compelling purpose and story; something that connects with your customers’ vested interests. At the same time, there needs to be a practical approach toward achieving this vision, offering clarity for all those involved who themselves need the appropriate time and resources to achieve the brand-building. The most effective visions tend to be versatile, allowing employees to adapt their methods to new and developing challenges. Marketing teams need to fully understand their approach at a conceptual level, so their methods can be aligned with brand personality, organisational values and ambition, which go further than the day-to-day operations of the business.
3. Establishing fresh subcategories
Without new innovations keeping your brand relevant and allowing it to grow, all you do is give your competitors space in which to operate, to become more advanced and relevant until they eventually replace you. Significant or transformational innovation is required so that subcategories can take your brand into new levels of specialty, transforming without discarding any of the qualities observers have come to recognise.
4. Continued breakthrough branding
A brand cannot sit still for long. New and updated marketing strategies are necessary even for allowing established brands to break through the noise, with implementation being far more crucial than budget when it comes to success. The marketing landscape is developing all the time, so needs constant reassessment in order to connect with the opportunities out there in a swift and effective manner – before your competitors get there.
5. Understanding Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)
Narrowing down the most appropriate IMC process has been made more and more complicated by the digital world, which has seen advertising and sponsorship opportunities become more versatile and less easy to assess. Success in this area demands constant research, as new advertising routes now exist in direct competition with each other, often clashing and requiring multifaceted execution. Marketing teams need to be constantly learning and be able to respond quickly to any new avenues that might enhance your brand.
6. Digital tactics
Digital needs a switch in brand mindset. Although we already live in a post-digital world, organisations still strategies with traditional models. In the digital realm, it is the audience that has the most control. Marketing tactics require the flexibility ability to think adaptively in a landscape which has far more pitfalls than previously encountered. New initiatives need to be inventive, with the ability to incorporate the unexpected and to blend with the interests and passions of the consumer. Organisations need to work in partnership, therefore, assessing how their own market presence is progressing and transforming due to customer behaviour, as opposed to via a route they have crafted in-house.
7. Internal brand crafting
If employees are not invested in an organisation’s vision or fail to understand it, they are unlikely to perform well in terms of breakthrough branding or successful IMC. A higher purpose is essential, therefore, if a team is to be inspired to enhance a brand to its full potential.
8. Safeguarding brand relevance
Investing in and adapting to new market knowledge has become more challenging than ever before in the digital realm. All brands now face three significant threats to staying relevant, which are: losing brand energy, emerging motivations to buy elsewhere, and fewer customers being invested in the brand’s key offer.
9. Synergy and clarity for brand-portfolio strategy
Goal-setting and targeted work operations are crucial for enhancing a brand. Overall strategy needs to be set out with an appreciation for specific instruction and resources while including any plans for branded differentiators and energisers.
10. Growth via brand asset management
A brand that is bolstered with innovative offerings can achieve growth, whether through direct brand enhancement or by differentiating into another product group. If assessed wisely, a brand can prove equally successful in a fresh context.
Meeting branding requirements
The challenge is for organisations to assess each of these objectives to ascertain which are most applicable to their own brands, before deciding on the way forward. Once the vision has been aligned with a marketing process, teams can come to understand where their brand is falling short and what developments are needed to fill the gap.