Why Spend Budget on Brand Strategy?

In this article, you’ll learn some reasons to invest in brand strategy ahead of design and marketing. You can articulate the importance of this critical task and help your clients, CEOs, or other stakeholders to understand too now.

Today brand strategy is not as foreign a concept as it used to be. One of our customers asked us for a company that hasn’t yet launched should they focus on brand strategy. Should brand strategy be their number one priority at this early stage? We’re not sure if a customer was asking for his brand or considering a conversation you might have with a client, but it’s clear that that is still a challenge today. Pivoting that conversation, from design or marketing to brand strategy, is still a big challenge. So we want to give you seven reasons: you can use to articulate the importance of brand strategy to your clients ahead of design and marketing so that you can show them the past. So you can give them those reasons why they should invest in brand strategy.

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Number one; brand strategy defines the audience. Now We know that there are some freelance designers and some marketing agencies who offer audience research services. Still, your audience research within a brand strategy goes much more detailed. It goes into precisely what a person is and considers the objectives they’re trying to meet, the outcomes they’re trying to achieve, all of the challenges that stand in their way of achieving those objectives, and how those challenges make them feel emotional. And it’s through that emotion that a brand can dig deep into what its audience is looking for and how they will resonate with that person on an emotional level.

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Number two; brand strategy, defines the position. Now neither design nor marketing defines the brand’s position in the market, which is the cornerstone of the brand strategy. It would help if you gave your audience a reason why they should turn to your brand and how you will fit into their lives. What value will you bring, and what role will you play in their lives? They have no reason to turn towards your brand if you don’t give them that reason. Everything else within the brand is built from this position, so it is a critical task in any brand-building exercise to define that position.

So that is a core reason why somebody needs to invest in brand strategy before designing a brand identity before going out to market their business reason number.

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Number three; brand strategy defines the brand persona. Now we don’t connect with features or benefits, and we don’t make decisions based on features or benefits. We make decisions based on emotion, and that’s been proven by science. That is how we make decisions. We justify with logic and make decisions based on feeling and the number one way we connect with people or even with others. We see things through their characteristics, and modern brands understand the importance of brand personality.

Today you can’t just go out and communicate like a corporate entity. That’s there to make money, and you need to connect with your audience on a human level through human characteristics and a human brand personal reason.

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Number four; brand strategy defines the message. Many business owners believe that their website copy is their brand message, but your website copy leverages your brand message. Your brand message is crafted within your brand strategy, and to craft your brand message, you need to understand the image that you want to place in your audience’s mind. Your brand should mean, and only then can you craft a brand message that will help to influence that image in the audience’s mind.

So defining your brand message is a really important task of the brand strategy, which happens long before any website copy is put together.

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Number five; brand strategy guides the design. Now the brand identity system has a very important task, and that is to engage the audience visually and to set the tone for what the brand should mean, and it does that through communicating characteristics visually. Now those characteristics are defined within the brand strategy, and that is based on the position that the brand wants to own in the mind of the audience how it wants to communicate how it wants to resonate, and what kind of image the brand should have in the mind of that audience. So the key here is characteristics. What characteristics? Are we going to leave it in the audience’s mind, and that is done?

Visually through the brand identity, without the brand strategy, there is no direction. There are no characteristics to set in the audience’s mind, and therefore there is no foundation for that design.

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Number six; brand strategy informs marketing. A marketing strategy is a collection of marketing tactics all working together as a cohesive system. Even if a business has a cohesive marketing strategy in place without the elements, I’ve described earlier, it doesn’t have that direction, a clearly defined audience, or a position that it’s going to own in the mind of the audience. It doesn’t have that personality or key Messages that they’re going to use to influence that audience, so any marketing without a brand strategy as a direction is a waste of money.

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Number seven; brand strategy guides long-term success. Within the brand strategy, you have your internal brand in the development process, and that’s where the internal belief system is built out within the brand. There are a lot of templates out there for brands to go and do this early on, and there are a lot of strategies that are built on such templates. This is an important element of the brand itself and the brand strategy when making strategic decisions when the brand knows why it’s there.

What purpose it exists for, who it exists for where it’s going, what kind of vision it has where it will be in the future. What that future brand looks like strategic decision-making becomes easier with this real compass in place. The brand leadership team needs to make those strategic decisions. In the long term, chances are you’ve gotten to this part of the article. You don’t need convincing. As to the importance of brand strategy, you already know, or at least by the end of this article, I hope you see the importance I hope you understand the importance of brand strategy.

But chances are these reasons will come into effect when you have conversations with other people when you have conversations with CEOs or stakeholders or business leaders who are considering their brand, who are considering where to invest budget, whether it should be in brand identity and a website or some Facebook ads and The topic of brand strategy comes up and pivoting that conversation and articulating, the importance of brand strategy is a really difficult task. So hopefully, with this article, you now have some reasons that you can give to clearly articulate the value of brand strategy. That will influence the mind of the person that you’re sitting opposite as to what they need to do to build a successful brand.