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How to manage your brand along its journey.As the volume of companies competing for customer attention increases, effective brand management has become a clear market differentiator. Therefore there has never been a more important time to develop a unique identity and value proposition through strategic branding. The creation of a successful brand doesn’t happen by chance; instead, it’s a set of actions taken to cultivate a brand, underpinned by a set of characteristics to steer and reinforce its identity over time. So while building a brand is fundamental to any business that wants to be successful, maintaining it is too, ensuring it stays relevant as consumer behaviour changes. For large or small companies alike, branding should be at the centre of all marketing activity. To follow this principle, the development of a strategic brand management process will help to ensure that your brand is accurately represented and portrayed at all times to your target audience.
Where are you on your brand journey?
This brand management process aims to help individuals, company owners and brand managers to gain a holistic view of brand management, intended to help them through their brand’s journey, whether that’s:
This brand management process is not a set path that needs to be followed, but rather a logical guide to help you grasp the overall concept of brand management allowing you to apply your own experience and techniques along the way. It is explained at a high level that makes it very clear for you to view the whole landscape. A closer look into each subject will enable you to expand your knowledge and gain a more detailed view of your surroundings. 360 brand management process®There are 10 steps and 4 phases within the 360 brand management process® designed to support you with your branding requirements. Discovering the true value of your brand.
The audit will focus; internally within your company, and externally with your customers, target market and your competition. Internally it will examine your brand’s products, services, and people, it’s business plan and sales and marketing approach. Externally, it will examine its niche market and how the target audience perceives your brand. Analysis of your brand’s competitors will include market share and positioning, sales and marketing activity, distribution and pricing. A more detailed customer review can be done in the next step that focuses on your marketing funnel and customer journey enabling you to fine-tune your brand positioning. The discovery phase will provide insight and a baseline view of:
The audit can be completed in full, or in part, depending on your own business requirements. This information will then become the foundation on which to set your brands goals, build a strategy and align all areas of the business where required. Step 1: Knowlege.
Step 2: Insight.
A brand is like a flag, conveying everything about its people, culture, beliefs and values. Defining your brand's unique place.
Having gathered all the information needed from the discovery phase, further analysis is required in order to assess customer interactions with your brand. This includes how your brand is attracting customers compared to the competition. At this stage of the process, a closer examination of the buyer journey, particularly at the top end of the funnel, will help you to gauge the current awareness, familiarity, and consideration given to your brand.
The next step is to develop and understand the true meaning and purpose of your brand. This is achieved through the cumulative knowledge and insight gained from the discovery phase, with a particular focus on your brand’s vision, its niche, customer profile, and competitors. Here you will establish your brand’s foundations, its pillars and key differentiators which together will form its uniqueness and enable you to finalise your positioning statement. Your brand positioning will drive your marketing strategy and aid in the creation of its overall brand identity and image. Your brand positioning will drive your marketing strategy and aid in the creation of its overall brand identity and image. Step 3: Analyse.
Step 4: Define.
Creating your brand's individual attributes.
Your brand’s personality should be derived from keywords that best describe its character as if your brand was a person. To achieve this, attributes should be listed, which state how you want your brand to be perceived by your target audience, and how you want to make them feel. This development process will start to build character to your brand, and next, personality traits need to be added to really bring your branding to life. Now is the optimum point to develop a brand name. If it has already been done, now is the time to validate it and ensure it fits with the brand personality that has been carefully crafted. By following all of the steps within the creation phase, you will be able to accomplish:
This process may take some time and require significant input and can be beneficial if done in parallel with the design phase. Step 5: Prepare.
Step 6: Create.
Developing your brand's visual image.
Your logo design should reflect the essence of your brand and the key elements that were built within the positioning and creation phase. If done correctly, your brand image will encapsulate everything your brand stands for, and want to convey to your target market.
When developing your logo design, your aim should be to make it simple, enabling it to be quickly decoded through the human eye, so typography, shapes, colours, and space must be combined to create a highly effective identity. Certain visual characteristics can be more prominent like its colour or boldness to reflect its attitude and personality. Your tagline should be an integral part of the logo as it tells people who you are and what you stand for, rather than what you do. The application phase includes the production of all the marketing and communication material, promotions, campaigns and slogans, all that must stay true to your brand image. To ensure the integrity of your brand identity, guidelines must be in place to protect its application, explaining how your brand should be used both internally and externally. These guidelines should be comprehensive enough so that everyone in the company can refer to them to know how their brand should be represented. Step 7: Design.
Step 8: Produce.
Tracking results and performance.
For tracking brand performance online, like social media or email marketing, there are a plethora of tools available that will help you with the analysis and measurement. For an offline activity like press advertising, custom landing pages offer the best solution as they will measure web traffic diverted to the site. Measuring customer engagement based on experience and association can be a challenge, however, looking at ways to capture this information is the key to understand how your brand is perceived and rooted in the minds of your customers. A closer look at touchpoints will enable you to best see where and how this can be measured. In addition, analysis of the sales funnel targeted towards the lower end of the funnel should be conducted in order to track purchasing habits based on the push from marketing efforts and the pull from consumers. Customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy should also be measured to fully understand the final steps of the customer journey. Selecting between 5 and 10 KPIs would be the most optimal, then fine-tuning your efforts at the earliest opportunity will help bring greater clarity to your campaign and the behaviour of your target audience. Step 9: Rollout.
Step 10: Monitor.
Download the 360 brand management process® eBookWherever you are in your brand’s journey, and at whatever time in its lifecycle, you can subscribe now and download the complete eBook to ensure you are on course and doing everything needed to maximise the true potential of your brand.
Published by Brandallagency.com 360 Brand Management Process® author David Farthing gives Brandall Agency the exclusive rights to use this methodology with its customers. Branding examples can be found on our projects page and our latest branding and product launch example is Elements and its e-commerce shop. How does marketing contribute to the success of a business?The importance of marketing for your business is that it makes the customers aware of your products or services, engages them, and helps them make the buying decision. Furthermore, a marketing plan, a part of your business plan helps in creating and maintaining demand, relevance, reputation, competition, etc.
What are the three core competencies through which sustainable market positions may be reached?3 Core Competencies You Must Follow For Successful L&D. Grow at scale with market reach, revenues and impact.
Which answer best explains how marketers can succeed?Which answer best explains how marketers can succeed? Successful marketers stand-out rather than fit-it.
What is the name of the marketing strategy that entails pursuing multiple segments at the same time?Differentiated Marketing. Differentiated market targeting offers us a little more depth and clarity. It's otherwise known as 'segmented' marketing and entails isolating a number of (generally two or more) primary target segments that have the most potential value for the company.
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