Strategic Branding: Definition, Importance, and Elements

Many business owners dream of creating brands that customers can identify as easily as, say, Coca-Cola. Powerful identities like this can boost brand perception and even improve overall brand performance.

The key to seeing these types of results lies in strategic branding. Creating and building a brand can’t be done haphazardly, though, so it’s important to have a firm idea of what you want to accomplish and how. We’ll walk you through what you need to know about strategic branding and its role in giving your company a strong brand name to set you up for success.

• What is strategic branding?
• Why is brand strategy so important?
• Strategic branding elements
• Consider the types of brand architecture
• Creating a successful brand strategy

What is strategic branding?

Strategic branding is the process of developing a long-term plan and goals for becoming a business that customers recognize and prefer over the competition. While having a website, logo, and even a memorable name is important, a brand strategy is much more holistic and outlines how you plan to connect to customers in an emotional and positive way.

When you use strategic branding well, you can build an audience that automatically associates certain emotions with your brand and chooses you when looking for companies within your industry. Strong brand messaging can encourage customers to trust you as an expert and buy from you.

Here’s what you need to know about strategic branding and its role in business development and building brand awareness.

Why is brand strategy so important?

Strategic branding can help keep you front and center in the minds of your target audience and encourage them to see your organization as the answer to their pain points. With a strong brand strategy, you can:

• Build consistent guidelines across your marketing campaigns, helping everyone work together more cohesively and with less confusion.
• Help your organization differentiate itself from the messaging of your competitors, demonstrating what makes you unique. In other words, it helps to establish your value proposition.
• Build a better company culture. When you have a strong brand personality, you’ll naturally attract professionals who align with that ethos. This, in turn, encourages a healthy company culture where people feel they have common goals. This is a great retention strategy.
• Encourage customer loyalty and a good customer experience. With a strong brand outlook, your customers will engage with you knowing what to expect, which helps them feel satisfied with your service. Similarly, they’ll feel more inclined to keep buying from you when they appreciate your brand values.
  

Let’s explore the elements that play a critical role in developing this type of branding.

Strategic branding elements

To incorporate strategic branding into your marketing strategy, there are nine main elements you should focus on developing. They include:

Audience persona

It’s important to have a firm understanding of your target audience. Knowing who you want to connect with, what drives them, what interests them, and how you can build an emotional connection with them can provide you with the building blocks you need to build your strategy.

Go beyond the basics of your target buyer—including psychographics and demographics—and instead get to know them as people through interviews, research, and questionnaires. What are their pain points? What are they emotionally connected to? Zeroing in on your audience is one of the most important steps because it dictates how you move forward with the rest of the stages.

Competitive analysis

To adequately stand out to customers, it’s also important to have an understanding of who the competition is and what they already offer on the market. See how they market themselves and where the weaknesses lie in their strategy so you know where you can best reach customers. However, also take note of their strengths and the types of marketing customers respond to the best, as this might provide valuable insight as you move forward with your own marketing campaigns.

Differentiation analysis

Once you know where your competitors fall short, determine how you’ll position your business to cement what makes you different. Think about what you can emphasize in your messaging that will make your brand memorable and capable of standing out from the rest of the competition. For example, despite so many companies selling makeup, LUSH sets itself apart from other beauty brands by promoting handmade products and corporate responsibility—many of its competitors can’t say the same. These facts are important to today’s consumer.

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Human brand persona

Now, give your customers a human element within your brand to relate to. Consider how you can build a human entity within your brand to represent your values and what makes you a better company. This entity can also help demonstrate your commitment to solving problems for the customer.

For example, recall the Apple “Get a Mac” commercials that aired in the first decade of the 2000s. Contrasting the hip, relatable millennial personifying the Mac computer with the older, more “stuffy” and less interesting representative of the PC helped drive home what Apple wanted to communicate to their audience: The Mac was the convenient, fun, and exciting computer they wanted to buy.

When your persona works well, it can drive brand equity, which is the value prescribed to your business. Customers will build strong associations with your company, which can then improve your reputation and brand recognition.

Tone of voice

As a part of bringing this brand persona to life, also consider the tone of voice that will communicate your brand. This is a classic case of “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.”

Use what you know about your target audience to determine the language and tone that will resonate with them best. For example, consider if your target audience will want you to be professional, casual, relatable, or authoritative. Harley-Davidson has an excellent example of a distinct, brand-appropriate tone of voice. Communicating confidence and even a bit of aggression with language like “Resistance is futile,” the brand connects with the type of people interested in their type of bike.

Tagline

The tagline is a few words that you’ve selected to cement the role and value of your brand. It should align with your logo, tone, and marketing campaigns to further support the brand persona and personality you want to communicate. The tagline should only be a few keywords that can easily stick in the customer’s mind, further building their recall of your brand. De Beers’ “A diamond is forever” provides an excellent example of a concise message that quickly communicates what the brand offers (in this case, high-end jewelry).

Core message

Your core messaging framework boils down to all the key elements you want to make sure the audience understands about your organization. This is less about creating brand messaging that you’ll use within your campaigns and more about creating brand guidelines within the company. These concepts should capture what your brand wants to communicate across campaigns and everything you want customers to understand about your business. This can help your employees understand your core values so they have unified goals and visions for brand building. This builds teamwork and helps everyone have a common vision.

Storytelling

Your storytelling framework works to capture what you want to communicate about your brand and turn it into a story that customers will remember and can relate to. In fact, people remember information told to them in a story 22 times better than they do if you simply relay a series of facts.

With storytelling, you can demonstrate how your business will solve the customer’s problems. Focus on the emotions you want to elicit and how customers envision themselves receiving the assistance that can come from your organization. This will help them begin to weave your product or service into their own narrative.

Brand identity

Brand identity involves creating a series of visually meaningful strategies for identifying your brand. This might include your logo, product images, and other types of images you use in your visual identity to communicate your brand story. When this is paired with your overall strategy, these brand elements help transfer the desired emotions and associations with your brand to the image, which can then inspire customers across multiple campaigns, platforms, and touch points.

Consider the types of brand architecture

As you begin to strategize and build your brand, you have the choice of a few different types of brand architecture. The choice you make will depend on how you want the different products you sell to relate to each other and the rest of your brand.

Even if you have a small business, it helps to think about how you want your different product and service lines to relate when it comes to branding. Having this in place not only can help provide you with guidelines as you build your brand, but it can also help you have a smooth transition if your company experiences notable growth as it matures.

Branded house

With a branded house, you have one overarching brand that speaks for all the different products you’re selling. An excellent example can be found with Apple products. The brand of sleek, modern design is assigned to all of the different Apple products, including the iPhone, iMac, and iPad.

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House of brands

On the other hand, a house of brands occurs when you have multiple products or categories of products that all fall under a single overarching brand, but they are each branded independently. Consider, for example, Proctor and Gamble (P&G). The overarching brand strategy of P&G lies in creating high-quality, trustworthy products.

However, under this brand, there are multiple brands, including Tide, Pampers, Dawn, and Gillette. Each of these product lines—while aligning with overall P&G branding—also carry their own unique branding that speaks to customers on its own. Customers buy Dawn dish detergent because they trust the branding from Dawn, not simply because it’s a P&G brand.

Hybrid brands

With a hybrid brand, a business brings together different types of brand architectures. Hybrid brand planning allows businesses to accommodate different movements within their organizations. For example, if they acquire companies that already have an established brand, they can be incorporated into the overarching brand architecture without too much hassle.

At the same time, the organization might have product lines that depend more on the parent branding. Hybrid branding allows the business to determine how they want to balance the emphasis of the individual product brand with the overarching parent brand for each product or line of products sold. You can see this architecture on Amazon. The retail giant uses it for its products and services, such as Amazon Kindle and Amazon Web Services. Each smaller brand has its own marketing but leans on the Amazon brand to different degrees.

Endorsed brands

With an endorsed brand, you have an overarching brand that provides additional branding and support for brands that fall under its umbrella. Take Marriott, for example. Courtyard by Marriott has its own branding, but it also carries a direct endorsement from Marriott, which promises customers that they’ll have a Marriott-worthy experience when they stay in one of these hotels.

Sub-brands

A sub-brand has a very close relationship with the main brand’s architecture. You can see this type of layout when you look at some popular tech companies, like Samsung. Samsung has its own brand and reputation as a technology company, but it also has sub-brands, like Samsung Galaxy. Samsung Galaxy has its own branding as a producer of products, like phones, that carries a reputation. Customers have their own associations with this sub-brand, although it remains strongly connected to Samsung messaging.

Creating a successful brand strategy

As you begin to work through these components of building a brand strategy, make sure that you move through the steps correctly and that your efforts produce the desired impact. Following a brand positioning plan and walking through the following four steps can help make sure you achieve your desired results.

Step 1: Define your brand’s objectives and how to communicate them.

First, think about what goals you have for your brand. Your objectives are what you want to accomplish as an organization. For example, you might have a long-term goal that you want to increase your market share by 10% over the year or you want to build a brand reputation known for luxury. Naming these goals can then help you construct a path forward. Know what you want customers to associate with your brand and how you want to communicate those ideas.

Step 2: Identify your ideal audience or consumer.

Determine what your brand wants to articulate to potential customers. Before you can move through any of the other steps, know who you want to talk to and what they want to hear. For example, if you sell camping gear, you might want to specifically target the audience of novice campers interested in finding products that are easy to set up and take down. Your language and marketing will focus on this audience, not experienced backpackers. The more you hone in on an audience, the more likely you will succeed in your efforts.

Step 3: Identify your competitors.

You also can’t move forward with your marketing efforts and brand building without an intimate idea of who your competitors are. Look at your competitors online and in person, depending on your industry. If you’re a retailer, for example, you might have local shops that compete with you but face entirely different organizations online. Know who your competitors are, what they have to offer customers, and what differentiates you from them so you can serve your clients best.

Step 4: Engage potential customers.

Finally, the time comes for you to engage directly with your customers. Knowing what they want to see from you and how you can position your brand to stand out in their minds, based on the steps above, will give you the material you need to lay the foundation for a solid relationship. For example, you might reach out to your target audience through social media alongside your business website. Your brand will be prepared to present your image and persona and let customers know how you’ll solve their pain points.

Benefits of hiring a strategic branding manager

If you’re ready to get started building your organization with strategic branding, it’s a good idea to bring together a team to help you reach your goals. An independent branding manager can be a valuable member of your team, bringing extensive experience with strategic branding to the group. In-house branding and marketing professionals might work on a handful of branding efforts over the course of their careers; however, freelancers have the opportunity to specialize in this area of marketing and can be very valuable.

See what the brand managers on Upwork can do for your organization. Explore the idea of adding independent talent to your team to accomplish your marketing goals.