A great brand strategy has the ability to humanize a brand enough that it becomes as familiar and lovable as a friend. Their values resonate with your values and you become a loyal member of the tribe.
Key aims of the brand strategy process
— Align your positioning
— Understand your vision
— Uncover your core values
— Differentiate your brand’s personality
— Find your raison d’être — your reason for existence
— Communicate your mission
— Create your branding design brief
Brand audit
To begin the brand strategy process, we first conduct a brand audit. A brand audit is a brand health checkup, a simple analysis of your current service offering, positioning, values and whether these are communicated effectively through your visual identity.
1.1 Company background
During the brand audit we ask three key questions:
— When and where did your story begin?
— What were your first products/ services?
— What did you promise your first customers?
Service map
As we continue our brand strategy process we look into the brands DNA by brainstorming the organisations services/ products.
2.2 Service map
To help with the organisations service map, we ask our clients two key questions:
— What physical services/ products do you provide your customers?
— What are the problems that you solve for your customers?
Positioning
During brand positioning we want to find out where we sit in the market compared to our competition.
There are a couple of tools we can use to visualise where we are against our competitors. We use variations of these charts to see where our clients brands sit in relation to their competitors.
3.1 Competitor landscape
3.3 Competitor analysis
To help us and our clients with the hard process of comparison, we ask the following:
— What are the personalities of your key competitors?
— Where are there opportunities for you to differentiate against your competitors?
Road map
4.1 Road map
Our brand road map tool works as another discussion point, where we can help our clients imagine the brands blue sky future.
— What are the three key things from your past that got you to where you are today?
— What do you want to achieve in the near future?
— What do you want to achieve in the distant future?
— What do you want people to remember about your company?
— What are the three key things you want from the next 50 years?
— What are the three key things that make us who we are today?
Value map
A value brainstorm is a great place to begin when finding core values. Brainstorm your brand's values.
Example values: Passion, Diversity, Leadership, Collaboration, Integrity, Accountability, Respect, Quality, Brave, Building relationships, Championing differences, Humble, Curious, Open-minded, Customer-driven, Effective, Good value service, Efficient, Beauty, Function, and Reliability.
We use our value map to help distil the brainstormed brand values into just six - three key values, and three-second level, overlapping values.
5.2 Value map
We then help our clients consider these core values within a larger story. We expand on the key values to find which is the foundation, differentiator and driving value.
5.4 Value journey
For clarity, we can then visually simplify the core value journey into our value pyramid:
5.5 Value pyramid
To help do this, we ask:
— What are your three most important brand values?
— What are your foundation, differentiator and driving values?
Brand archetypes
Brand archetypes are an incredibly powerful tool in helping us and our clients understand their competitor’s brand personalities.
6.2 Archetype wheel
Consider the competitor’s brand archetypes. Place each competitor on the brand archetype wheel. Considering the remaining spaces, we can see if there is space for our client's brand to explore.
Brand archetype cards
Mission mapping
Through open discourse, we begin working on our clients mission statement by considering the 'what' - the simple, physical and tangible products and services. We can then consider the 'how' and finally find the 'why'.
7.1 What, how & why map
The key questions:
— What does our business offer?
— How are we unique?
— If not for profit, why should we exist
7.2 What, how & why
Visual metaphors
The visual reference is drawn from visual expressions. This mood board sets the context for the brand and might consider visuals, graphics, colour palettes and the general aesthetic mood. This mood board is the first step in creating visuals from strategy and should start to gently paint a visual flavour for the new brand.
8.1 Visual metaphors
The key questions we ask our clients and ourselves:
— What personality traits can be revealed from the core values?
— What visual expressions can be pulled from the personality traits?
Brand strategy document
A brand strategy framework is a great way to focus the team on a single document throughout the process. The document can be used throughout as a framework, and after the process as a reviewable document.
