A Step-By-Step Guide To Creating a Branding Strategy

Your branding effort is at the heart of your overall marketing approach. It supports your marketing plan and determines how and what materials you need to develop or update. This simple process is the basis for a Th!nk branding effort. Not only will you come away with focused branding tools, but also with data and analysis that will help sustain your current marketing plan.

Marketing Plan

Your marketing plan is your playbook. A means of visualizing the success of your company and its products. While there are many components to a marketing plan, the following key factors are paramount in your branding effort.

• Identify your audience, both internal and external. 
• Identify your marketing mix. 
• Identify your package mix by evaluating existing products and considering removing, repositioning, or recategorizing. 
• Establish the expected life cycle of this plan. 

Your branding strategy is part of your marketing plan. Our approach can be visualized as a pyramid. Each step in the process supporting the previous step by incorporating its goals and findings.

Branding strategy

1. Vision

• Differentiate yourself ourselves from not only the competition, but also in buyer and influencer perception.
• Consistently create and distribute marketing materials that support your Corporate Image Statement throughout the life cycle of our marketing plan.
• Grow by forming new relationships with identified audiences or in new markets.
• Establish market ownership by permeating the lexicon of industry insiders, employees and influencers.

2. Mission

• Increase the product and company recognition. 
• Popularize your product.
• Educate customers, influencers and employees.

3. Objectives

• Establish a brand platform/product offerings.
• Establish a brand architecture/sales model.
• Implement sustainable branding and sub-branding strategies.
• Increase sales, increase market share, increase consumer preference, build brand loyalty, raise relative price.

4. Actions

• Market research: discovery/inventory, internet visibility/presence assessment, SWOT analysis.
• Analyze research: establish findings.
• Concept and development.

5. Core Values

• Your core values are your corporate image
• In many respects, your corporate image is determined by your core values—whether intended or not. This process often reveals core values we didn’t know we had. 

Having a solid approach to branding strategy is key to growth in any company. Follow these steps to find a solid foundation for your marketing plan.