The most successful brands share one thing in common: they're built on rock-solid strategic foundations. When market conditions get rough, these brands don't just survive, they thrive, while competitors scramble to rebuild.
It’s easy to get overexcited, jumping straight into logos and colour palettes before figuring out what your business actually stands for. Building a brand that lasts always starts with business strategy, then moves into brand strategy. Skip this order, and you're basically putting lipstick on a Kunekune pig.
Business strategy isn't some mystical art form. It's actually quite straightforward when you break it down into three parts:
Diagnose the problem your business faces, develop an insight from that diagnosis, and create actions to capitalise on that insight. Think of it like going to the doctor. First, they figure out what's wrong, then they understand why it's happening, then they prescribe treatment. Same process, different context.
Starting with the numbers (because they don't lie):
If you're just starting out, your brand will likely be shaped by the problem you're trying to solve. But if you've been trading for a while, your P&L statement is your best friend for understanding where you actually stand. The metrics that matter most are sales trends, order value per product, gross profit margins, customer acquisition costs per channel, and your fixed costs.
Don't just look at these numbers in isolation though. Calculate the growth or decay rates. Are things getting better or worse? And more importantly, why?
Getting to the ‘why’ through research:
Your P&L tells you what's happening, but research tells you why it's happening. This is where you roll up your sleeves and do some proper detective work. You'll want to validate with three groups: your employees (they know where the issues really lie), your customers (they know what actually matters to them), and the market at large through an internet deep dive.
By the end of this process, you should have a solid understanding of your competitive landscape, who your customers really are, how you're currently differentiated, and whether your finances make sense.
Strategy without execution is just expensive planning. Your insights need to translate into specific actions that positively impact your bottom line. Yes, these actions will cost money upfront. But if you're thinking of them as expenses rather than investments, you're approaching this with the wrong mindset. Smart investments in strategy pay dividends down the track.
Once your business strategy is solid, you can start building your brand strategy. This is where things get more creative, but it still needs to be grounded in all that hard work you just did. You'll be creating two strategic frameworks that feed into each other: your brand strategy and your product strategy. They're basically inseparable - what affects one, affects the other.
Starting from the bottom and working up, you've got functional benefits, rational benefits, emotional benefits, brand personality, and brand essence.
Functional benefits are simply the problems you solve for your customers. If you're a meal delivery service helping busy people eat healthy without spending hours meal planning, that's your functional benefit. Straightforward stuff.
Rational benefits are the logical reasons customers choose you over competitors. This is where you get tactical about your differentiation. Maybe you're not the cheapest, but you're not premium either. Maybe you offer customisation that others don't. These are the head-based decisions.
Emotional benefits are where things get interesting. This is about how you want customers to feel when they interact with your brand. Do you want them to feel confident? Excited? Reassured? These feelings should map to different stages of their customer journey.
Brand personality is where you personify your brand. If your brand walked into a bar, what would they order? How would they introduce themselves? This comes from your brand archetypes and should feel authentic to everything you've built so far.
Brand essence is the glue that holds everything together. This is your vision, mission, purpose, values, and key metrics all rolled into one cohesive story.
Your product strategy pyramid starts with your vision, then mission statement, lean canvas, north star metrics, and lastly - your roadmap.
Vision is your desired future state in 5-10 years. A good starting question is "what change do we want to make in the world?" Keep it inspiring but grounded.
Mission explains how you'll pursue that vision. Think of it as the first sketch of your roadmap.
The lean canvas is your business idea on one page - think of it as your startup's CV. Instead of writing a 50-page business plan for no one to read, capture all the important stuff on a single sheet: the problem you're solving, who you're solving it for, and how you'll make money doing it.
North star metrics are crucial because they give your entire organisation a few single metrics to rally around. It needs to lead to revenue, reflect customer value, and measure progress. Everything else is just noise.
By now, your customer persona and journey map should be solid. You've got real data and insights informing these, not just assumptions. Your customer persona needs demographics, values, pain points, goals, and crucially, how they actually make purchasing decisions. Your customer journey map shows the full lifecycle from first awareness to loyal customer and beyond.
Now comes the visual stuff that most people think of as "branding." Brand colours aren't just about looking pretty. They convey personality and values. Choose a primary colour that represents your brand, a secondary that complements it, and tertiary colours for highlights and calls to action.
Typography is equally important. Fonts are the tones in which your brand communicates. Choose them carefully.
Logo creation is best left to specialists, but if you're bootstrapping, AI generators can work. Just make sure it works across all your touch points, especially social media.
Creating your brand book is the easy part. Getting everyone to actually follow it is where things get tricky. You need clear templates, and your creative director or equivalent needs sign-off authority on whether something is "on brand" before it goes live. No exceptions.
Building a brand isn't about picking pretty colours and calling it a day. It's about creating a coherent strategy that connects your business goals with your customers' needs, then executing consistently across every touchpoint.
Do the strategy work upfront, and everything else becomes significantly easier. Skip it, and you'll be constantly second-guessing decisions and wondering why your brand feels disconnected from your business. Remember, the brands that last are the ones built on solid foundations.
If you're running a business and not getting cosy with your financial statements, you're only guessing. And trust us, that never ends well.
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