Essential Components for your brand strategy

It will not surprise you that entering the title of this blog into a Google search bar will deliver countless suggestions from all over the world.

There are so many ‘5 Essential Components for your Brand Strategy’ suggestions it makes me wonder why I need to create another one.

However, here goes…

We support clients all the way through to ensuring that they, and their business, are ready for their chosen route of exit. Therefore, brand is a crucial part of our support of a client. With some clients it’s the only support we give them and have been doing so for many years. 

We’ve written countless Brand Strategy documents, and although there are components in a brand strategy that all of the above mentioned Google articles will list – and we will include some of them – we believe there are a few that perhaps those articles are missing. 

Let’s concentrate on those in this blog.

The Pole Star vision for the founder / board / business

Given our view that Growth to Exit is something that all founders / boards should have a clear view on at all stages of their business’s development, this needs to have a place in the brand strategy. If you’ve no idea of your ultimate destination, how can you be sure of the direction in which you should be travelling?

Objectives from your business strategy

A brand strategy cannot be usefully articulated unless it’s directly related to the objectives expressed in the company’s business strategy.

Seems obvious doesn’t it, but you’d be surprised how many businesses don’t fully relate the two.

The business strategy / plan and brand strategy should ideally be written in tandem and be considered two parts of one document to be fully effective.

Your Brand Story script

Every brand should have a story that entices their key customers. There are several ways of creating that story. The process that we generally use at Yellowyoyo is the StoryBrand Messaging Framework created by Donald Millar – Storybrand.com.

Important words to identify

There are two sets of words that need to be identified.

Firstly, every organisation should have a set of values that will govern its behaviour. Those value words (no more than 6) should be part of the brand strategy and their importance should be clearly explained.

The other set – again no more than – are words that describe how the organisation should be perceived. Knowing these will assist in informing all parts of the creative process, and ensure its relevance.

Positioning / Differentiation / Messaging

In terms of output, this is probably the most important part of the strategy.

Identifying your business’ optimal market positioning and differentiation, and the messaging that supports this, is key to its growth.

Want to discuss brand strategy in more detail?

We’d love to help.

You can contact us at hello@yellowyoyo.co.uk or leave us a message here.

Bryan