Last month we focused on brand audit, reviewing your brand to see how healthy it is. Taking the outcomes from that audit let’s focus on your strategy. In this issue we will cover a few key areas of your strategy; business ambition, vision, your brand objectives and brand promise.
Why are you here?
Your Business Ambition and Vision focus on your core purpose. Your Business Ambition is your mission, a statement around the purpose of your brand. It brings the essence of the brand into focus. Ask yourself why do you exist? It should be clear from this statement who you are, what you do and why you do it. It should be simple and concise. For example, Google’s mission statement is to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. This tells us clearly and concisely who Google are, what they do and why they do it. Another great example is Patagonia’s mission statement ‘to build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crises’. Your vision is the ultimate goal of your brand. It should be captured in a single sentence or paragraph. It is more aspirational in language. IKEA’s vision is ‘to create a better everyday life for many people’ while Starbucks’ is ‘to inspire and nurture the human spirit one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time’. Crafting these statements to ensure they communicate your core purpose takes time. It may not happen in five minutes or even overnight so don’t rush the process.
Brand Objectives
What do you want your brand to achieve? Take your business Ambition and Vision statement and break it down to measureable objectives. To determine your brand objectives ask yourself the following questions: do you want to be the go to brand in your sector, how many sales or new clients per year do you want to achieve, do you want to develop new products and services and how many, do you want your team to grow, how many staff do you want working on your team? Having identified your objectives take it a step further and break them down to short, medium and long term objectives. Define what short, medium and long term mean to you. To some five years is medium term while to others it could be 10.
Brand Promise
This is what you say you will deliver to everyone who interacts with your brand. It should describe what customers will expect from every single interaction with your brand across all touchpoints, offline and online. Some tips for developing your brand promise is to ensure it is clear, consistent, meaningful and measureable. For it to be meaningful you need to be able to deliver on your promise.
To ensure this and fulfil your promise all of your team must know and understand your brand promise but most importantly they need to be able to deliver on it. Arrange training for your team and make it a regular occurrence. Making your brand promises measureable will allow you to see if you are delivering on the commitment you have made. For example, FedEx’s Brand Promise was ‘we will get your package to you by 10:30 am the next day’, while Virgin’s promise is to be ‘genuine, fun, contemporary and different in everything we do at a reasonable price’ – clear, consistent, meaningful and measureable brand promises. Defining your mission, vision, brand objective and promise ensures you have clarity on who you are, what you do, how you do it and where you want to go as a brand. It should show how you stand out from the crowd, your point of difference from your competitors. Having these in place will allow for the proof to follow. Next month we will discuss values and traits and just how significant they are to every decision you make about your brand.
Article by: Sandra Honan