BRAND STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT

Since a brand creates an experience, you can brand almost anything - a concept, an action, a product, a service or a company.

The first step in defining your brand strategy is to define the type of brand you're building: an individual product or service brand, a company brand, a family brand or an idea brand.

You'll align your brand with the high-level method in which your brand delivers value to the marketplace, and identify the theme for your brand - for example, whether it's innovative, creative, cool, authoritative, essential, supportive, friendly, warm, caring, kind, gentle, matter-of-fact, competitive, aggressive, comforting or blunt.

Brands that tap into people's emotions are far more powerful than brands that don't.

Connecting with human emotions is an inexact science at best - it's more of an art, and it's the main thrust of consumer marketing.

By determining which benefits of your product or service are most important to your market, and which benefits are emotional, you'll have a strong understanding of what your brand should mean to your market.

Your brand experience is the essence of what you represent - it's the embodiment of your positioning, and the experience you wish to deliver at each interaction with the market.

Adding human personality traits to your brand will help you crystallize the experience you want to deliver. They'll serve as a check and balance mechanism for your campaign creative and messaging to create a memorable experience.

Good brands also deliver a promise to the market - communicating a simple, singular idea that supports your positioning and the mindshare that you wish to own.

Your brand positioning statement is a 25- to 35-word statement that captures the essence of your brand - who you are, what you do, for whom, along with a key differentiator or your brand promise.

Your brand story is a longer narrative that gives you a chance to connect with your market - to introduce your personality, convey what you stand for and show why you care.

Stories have been used to communicate for thousands of years; a good brand story can solidify your positioning and support your brand experience.

For many consumer product marketers, much of the "branding" takes place in the packaging and campaign imagery. Visual identity ties into human emotions, and there are plenty of case studies of consumer packaging redesigns that infuriated a customer base or dramatically increased sales.

Service companies and B2B brands encompass more than just a label, box, or package, but the visual identity can unify a brand, neutralize it or worst of all, damage it.

By defining the key elements to your visual branding - Relevance (Do the visuals support your defined brand strategy and promise?), Quality (Are the visuals professionally designed?), and Consistency (Are the visuals consistent at all market touchpoints?), you'll ensure that your visuals reinforce your positioning and brand experience.

You make an impression - positive, negative or neutral - with your market at every touchpoint.

To deliver a consistent brand experience, you must ensure that every interaction with your market supports your brand strategy. Part of that results from your brand visual imagery and copy. The rest of it results from your people's interactions with the market.

By identifying every touchpoint your customers and prospects have with your company and the people who represent your brand, you'll have an understanding of how well your people are supporting your positioning, brand promise and brand experience.