Brand Strategy & Market Positioning

Brand Strategy is a Leadership Issue

Brand strategy is often treated as only a communications exercise.

In practice, it is a leadership issue because how a business is understood in the market reflects the decisions leadership teams make internally, the priorities they reinforce, and how consistently those decisions are executed across the organisation.

This is why brand strategy is often part of broader work on strategic repositioning, leadership alignment and decision clarity.

Read ‘Brand Performance Reflects Leadership

What Brand Strategy Clarifies

Market Position

Clarifies where the organisation competes, what it stands for, and what differentiates it in a crowded market.

Meaning & Differentiation

Defines the signals customers, employees and stakeholders should consistently experience.

Portfolio Coherence

Ensures products, services and offers reinforce one recognisable strategic direction.

Trust & Consistency

Aligns narrative, behaviour and leadership decisions so market trust is strengthened rather than diluted.

Where Brand Strategy & Market Positioning Work is Most Relevant to Drive Growth

If you are evaluating the potential need for brand strategy and market positioning input in your organisation consider where this work is most relevant.

  1. Strategic repositioning
  2. Growth that has blurred your offer
  3. Portfolio complexity and confusion
  4. Category similarity, generification and weak differentiation
  5. Leadership decisions that are sending mixed or confusing signals to the market

How Brand Strategy & Market Positioning Connects to Leadership Alignment

Brand performance often reflects leadership decisions before leadership teams fully recognise their effects.

That is why brand strategy and market positioning are not separate from leadership clarity.

Strong brand performance and trust is one of the clearest external expressions of robust leadership clarity and good judgement.

Clarity

Judgement

Trust

Brand Leadership & Leadership Alignment

When you look at the Brand Leadership Framework and the Leadership Friction Framework below it becomes clearer how brand strategy is an important leadership function and consequently, the alignment of the full leadership team is critical to organisational and commercial success.

The Leadership Friction Framework did not emerge separately from the earlier Brand Leadership work. It grew from the same repeated pattern—Brand performance reflects leadership decisions before leadership teams fully recognise their effects. 

Persona Brand Leadership Framework

Persona Brand Leadership Framework

It helps you achieve:

Brand Leadership

The Brand of 1st Choice

Different, Trusted, Wanted

Premium Pricing Status

Attract & Retain Top Talent

Higher Sales & Profits

From Brand Leadership to Leadership Friction

Persona Brand Leadership Framework evolving into the Leadership Friction Framework

It helps you improve:

  1. Strategic Priorities
  2. Decision Ownership
  3. Leadership Alignment
  4. Judgement Boundaries
  5. Reduced Friction
  6. Decisive Execution
  7. Differentiation Protected
  8. Risks Mitigated
  9. Governance Coherence
  10. Strategic Momentum

Build Sustainable Leadership

The Persona Brand Leadership Framework together with the Leadership Friction Framework provide repeatable, scalable, systems that when used effectively, drive both commercial, organisational and leadership success.

Brand Leadership + Leadership Alignment = Performance

Brand is Leadership Made Visible

What is Brand Strategy?

Brand strategy is the codification and mapping out of your brand in order to make it highly distinctive, different, memorable, credible, trustworthy and extremely likeable by your ideal target customer.

It helps you identify, articulate, clarify, pressure test and distill your value proposition so its compelling both internally and externally.

It’s about identifying and leveraging your brand’s distinction factors, emotional advantages and connective hooks to your ideal audience—with integrity and authenticity—so you can achieve and maintain your competitive edge and grow your profits.

It’s important to note that branding should not be confused with marketing or design. These are separate interlinked disciplines that are also essential elements in building and sustaining a successful organisation.

The fact is, brand strategy and market positioning coupled with the business strategy, provide the direction for key commercial decisions in your organisation along with culture development, marketing campaigns and design execution.

They are part of the foundations underpinning your business because they provide the direction for growth—including your revenue—led by strong well aligned leadership. Together they inform how you’ll consistently execute your growth strategy through your marketing campaigns and design application.

Brand Strategy Market Positioning Leadership Performance

Brand strategy, marketing and design are separate yet integrated disciplines and are essential to all successful businesses. The question is how to utilise and leverage each function to best effect. Many high-performing organisations with leading brands around the world provide solid examples of how to build, develop and maintain leadership—success leaves clues worth evaluating.

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Brand Strategy
Brand Strategy Leadership Programme
 
 
Brand Identity

Explore Building Your Brand Strategy Starting with a Diagnostic Conversation

Part of a successful brand strategy and strong market positioning is defining what is immutable and what is flexible. Execution may change while the brand strategy remains the same. Tactics may vary but the core brand strategy and its DNA remains constant.

To build out your brand strategy successfully consider using the Persona Brand Leadership Framework™, because its very robust, thoroughly tried and tested by countless other organisations and built to help you get the results you want—and has also featured on The Economist Group platform.

Want to start a conversation about your brand strategy and market positioning, brand leadership or perhaps leadership alignment?

  1. Schedule an appointment — meetings are hybrid, in-person and/or online, depending on your preferences and location
  2. Let’s start with a diagnostic conversation
  3. Consider what you may need and what a customised plan could look like for you
  4. And perhaps implement the plan together
  5. Contact us: [email protected] or +35318322724

 

Why Build a Robust Brand Strategy & Market Positioning?

The truth is, when developed properly, your brand strategy enables you to be relevant, purposeful, innovative, inspiring and on-trend in the context of your market sector. It provides direction for and supports your business strategy. It influences the total operation of your business so you can achieve long-term brand relevance, consistent brand behaviours, compelling messaging that resonates and a strong customer-centric culture that attracts and retains high-performing talent and customers alike.

A strong brand strategy enables you to build a brand with meaning and significance that attracts the right people, your ideal kind of people—a loyal community of customers and talent alike. It enables you to create incomparable brand experiences across all points of contact and channels of communication in your organisation so you can generate high-quality leads, increase market share, achieve premium price points, grow sales and close high-value deals. In a nutshell, it’s a critical and essential factor in your commercial success.

How to Build a Strong Brand Strategy to Drive Growth

Developing a brand strategy and market position can sometimes be one of the more challenging steps for those unfamiliar with the process because there’s a lot of confusing information around what branding or brand strategy actually is. Brand strategy comes before marketing execution or design application because it provides the direction for marketing and design, so it’s no surprise that business leaders and entrepreneurs sometimes find it problematic.

So whether you’re building an ambitious new challenger brand, disrupting the status quo or expanding your international reach, your brand strategy is a vital step in building your business successfully, B2B or B2C, product or service, SME or global enterprise. It even ties in as a key part of developing and managing your personal brand, particularly when you’re in a leadership role and, most importantly, helps you mitigate risk.

This diagram below illustrates the key elements required in building out a strong brand strategy together with examples of the areas typically included as a core part of the implementation process—getting your brand out into the word so it performs and supports generating consistent sales.

 

Build Your Brand Strategy, Market Positioning and Foundations

Before Design, Communications or Marketing Activities

FIRST
A brand must evaluate, identify, codify, map out and articulate what it stands for – to become highly differentiated, visible, credible, trusted, and much liked, so it can command a premium, give its customers a compelling reason to buy, and achieve higher revenue.

The elements listed below are the roadmap for every brand because the outputs provide the direction for key commercial decisions as well as communications, design application, and marketing activities.

SECOND
Design, visual content, text, sales scripts, campaigns and marketing activities and brand collateral are created to communicate the brand’s offering and attract its ideal customers to close the sale.
They all take their direction from the outputs in the first column — encapsulated in your Master Brand Strategy Document.
The messaging, visual language expressing the brand in a meaningful context is created once the factors that make it different, credible, trustworthy and likeable to its ideal customers and stakeholders have been identified in stage one as listed.
Your cohesive brand strategy growth plan is then implemented to increase visibility, credibility and profits.
Psychology of InfluenceBrand and Sub-Brand Naming
Brand FundamentalsTaglines
Brand PurposeVisual Identity & Graphics
Brand VisionLogo Design & Fonts
Brand MissionSignature Colour Palette
Brand ValuesWebsite/Social Platforms
Positioning (relative to customer perceived competitors)Copywriting Style and Signature Language
Brand PromiseCore Brand Graphic Elements
Product/Service Productisation and HierarchiesPhotography/Illustration Style
Purchaser Personas / Customer AvatarsVideo and Music Style
Signature Language and Tone-of-VoiceBrand Collateral e.g. Packaging Design, Brochures
Brand Personality (archetype, not mascots or VIPs)Advertising, Direct Mail, Lead Magnets
Brand StoryBrand Sales Scripts
Brand CultureMarketing Campaigns
Customer Journey and ExperienceThought Leadership, Blog, Newsletter
Value PropositionCo-Branding & Partnership Collaboration
Master Brand Strategy DocumentBrand Style Guide
Management Brand Induction and Leadership DevelopmentStaff Brand Induction and Training, Brand Champion Training, Culture Development

Note: Your Brand Style Guide can only be fully developed after all your brand assets and brand collateral, as listed in the right-hand column above, have been created because a brand style guide is a tool to manage and protect your brand assets after you’ve been through the full creative process, developed and produced your brand identity assets.

A brand style guide can’t be produced until the creative process has been completed because the fully developed assets make up the guide content. They are compiled in the guide after they’ve been generated from the creative process — the same way you can’t produce a film or promotions without first creating the script and casting your characters.

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Build Your Brand as a Business Asset

Done correctly, your brand strategy provides the direction for key aspects of your business including customer needs, emotional drivers, pain and success points, product or service structures, brand collateral and competitive challenges.

The outputs from building and developing your brand strategy and market positioning are then used to guide leadership performance and inform direct implementation—the action plan for putting your brand to work. This is the communications system that provides structure and guidance for all points of contact within the business, both internally and externally with your stakeholders and customers.

Your brand will typically engage in countless communications, small and large, repeatedly on and offline, in multiple ways throughout the life of your business or organisation. Those communications stem from your brand strategy and market positioning, however they must be consistent and congruent in all forms to be successful.

Why is brand consistency and congruency so important you might ask? Because if your brand interactions, messaging, customer experience or internal culture, for example, are inconsistent it breeds distrust. When trust is undermined customers do not buy and your talent, the backbone to your business, often looks for more attractive alternatives elsewhere.

Trust underpins the success of all successful organisations and brands over time, but in order to build trust, you need strategic clarity and robust good judgement—all of which comes from coherent leadership of high performing executive teams.

 

A Strong Brand Strategy & Market Position is Essential if  You Want to be Highly Profitable and Leave Your Competitors Far Behind 

Consider how you want to re-invent, revitalise or build your brand so that its highly differentiated, relevant, credible, trusted, and strategically positioned to command a premium—so you can achieve higher revenue with strong brand leadership.

Transform Your Brand & Increase Your Sales

Your Persona Client Satisfaction Guarantee

  1. When you work with us, we’ll build a customised brand leadership strategy and/or leadership alignment diagnostic/intervention with clear investment for you tailored to your specific requirements and preferences
  2. You’ll know each step of your leadership journey before we start because we’ll discuss it, document it, and agree on it with you before work commences
  3. You’ll have timelines, key milestones, and deliverables to evaluate and approve for each stage and part of the process
  4. Because we know the unexpected sometimes happens we can make adjustments along the way if you need it and if something extra is requested we’ll ensure you’re fully appraised about what that entails before committing
  5. As we achieve pre-agreed objectives you’ll be able to evaluate the work and strategy in progress, coupled with the outcomes to ensure return on investment

Want to start a conversation?

Email [email protected] or schedule a conversation here

Have you got some questions or want to start a diagnostic conversation about your brand strategy and market positioning?

Send us a short note and we’ll be in touch.

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    Brendan MurphyCommercial Director Wavin UK & Ireland | Wavin UK Ltd

    “Lorraine is a highly experienced and expert marketing professional. That’s just one way of putting it. She is an expert public speaker and her passion for subject matter shines though when she presents on a subject that is obviously close to her heart. Highly professional and credible, she is always looking for the best way to apply her talent for her clients best interest.

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    “I have known of Lorraine’s high quality work for a number of years and when I finally had the opportunity to work with her in developing a brand and marketing strategy she exceeded expectations.

    Lorraine patiently guided the team through the process and was excellent in identifying the nuances, do’s and don’ts of our target market. We started out thinking a brand was just a logo but now know better!

    Before this however, Lorraine had sat down for coffee on an number of occasions with my colleague and I on a different venture and was very generous with her time and sharing her knowledge. I aim to call on Lorraine many times in the future and look forward to it.”

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