Comparing Business and Brand Strategy is pointless, considering that both are essential for any business. A Business Strategy is a roadmap that allows you to achieve your business goals and contemplates a technical approach that includes vision, goals, SWOT analysis, goal definition, resource allocation, and marketing strategy. On the other hand, the Brand Strategy is a way to connect with your users from an emotional and human approach, including visual elements that form a good strategy together. In this blog post, you'll understand how to create a strong strategy, its elements, methods, and their main differences.
What is Business Strategy?
Business Strategy is the business plan of action that an organization develops and implements to achieve its long-term goals and objectives. It involves answering how a company will compete in its industry and create value for its stakeholders. Business Strategy is crucial for a company's success, guiding many organizational decisions, such as hiring new employees and developing new products. A good strategy provides guiding principles for the company and helps define the game plan (methods and tactics) needed to maintain competitiveness in the market.
What is Brand Strategy?
Before defining the key difference between Business and Brand Strategy, it’s necessary to know what Brand Strategy is. This Strategy is a holistic approach that integrates tone of voice, visual branding, identity, values, and overall brand vibe. It is used in Business Planning and describes how the company will generate a good relationship with its customer base. A Brand Strategy aims to become memorable!
The 7 Key Elements of a Successful Brand Strategy
A well-defined and solid Brand Strategy affects many business elements and is directly connected with user needs, emotions, and the competitive environment. Your brand doesn’t solely encompass a product, logotype, website, or name; more than that, it englobes your business vision.
1. Brand Strategy Purpose
It's important to know the purpose of your Brand Strategy and how to make it better than the competition. According to Business Strategy Insider, the purpose can be divided into two forms: functional and intentional. The functional approach evaluates success for commercial and immediate reasons, and the intentional approach is centered on success related to earning money and doing good. Making money is important, but building a brand that emphasizes your desire to achieve more than profitability is essential.
2. Brand Strategy Consistency
The idea is to separate some unimportant things from the Brand Strategy. Coherence is the main element that any Branding Strategy should have. For example, it's rare to post an image about dogs when your business is focused on selling cold coffee; it's weird and illogical. So, consider questions such as: What does posting on social media mean for your brand? Is the message aligned with your strategy? Does the message make any practical sense?
In a few words, consistency contributes to brand recognition and improvement in customer loyalty. We take as an example the consistency and coherence of Coca-Cola, considering that marketing elements work harmoniously. For example, Coca-Cola maintains a great presence on its social media sites, such as Instagram and Facebook. It's necessary to plan to avoid inconsistent content and bet on a style guide that contemplates many things, such as voice tone, color scheme, and the positioning of products and services.
3. Brand Strategy Emotion
Building user relationships with a dynamic emotional approach is essential because people need to build relationships with all. A perfect Brand Strategy must explain why its product or service is necessary to users. The main idea is focused on the perfect way to connect with your users and work on it through a deep emotional approach using emotional questions.
4. Brand Strategy Flexibility
Flexibility allows you to make adjustments that generate interest and differentiate your approach from the competition. The secret to finding flexibility is to dare to change.
5. Brand Strategy Involvement
The brand strategy includes achieving a consistent brand sense and a cohesive digital experience through a style guide. Likewise, getting employees to engage with potential customers is essential. The goal is to align customer service with good interactive, efficient, and friendly service.
Your customer service staff should offer good user engagement and create a good and trustworthy environment. It is important to focus on the offered values and achieve a solid service reputation with a helpful and human approach.
6. Brand Strategy Loyalty
If you already have clients who love you, your brand messaging, and your company, don't stay without doing anything; reward that trust! Cultivating loyalty allows you to retain more users, equal to making more profits. Loyalty is vital to any Brand Strategy and supports your sales organization. Developing a positive relationship with your ideal customers establishes a tone about what they can expect when doing business with you.
7. Brand Strategy Awareness
Consider competence a challenge to improve your strategy and create more value for your brand. You're in the same business chasing the same target customers, right? Are you being successful? Adapt your brand positioning statement according to your experience, and don't let the competition decide your success; use the competition as a reference to improve your business.
What is a Brand Methodology?
A proper brand methodology is needed to achieve a good Brand Strategy, including elements like Attitude Branding, which refers to attitudes and feelings related to your brand. On the other hand, Individual Branding refers to the brand's specific identity; it must be appealing to attract new users. Product Branding, maybe the most notorious one, is the one that relates your logotype, name, design, and color with your product to create a unique identity for the product. It's considered one of the best branding methods because it brings life and increases the uniqueness of products. Minimalist branding supports colors, design, and any visual element.
How to Make a Good Brand Strategy?
Creating a well-executed Brand Strategy is easy if you follow the next steps. First, it's necessary to define internal brand identity, including its purpose, vision, value proposal, mission, goals, and strategy. Due to this, you must identify your target audience or buyer persona and establish a purpose to meet their needs. Another step is to create your market position through questions like What makes you different from your competitors? Or how can you solve their problems and make your target audience's life easier or better? In the same sequence, knowing your target audience is useless if you don't create your brand's personality.
Finally, it's necessary to understand your brand's positioning through keywords defining its core. It's necessary to design creative messages, including products, visual identity design, communications, and customer service.
Defining the brand's name and slogan is also necessary, considering that not all brands have slogans, but a slogan brings more identity to the brand. Now, it's time to create your brand identity using a logo, brand colors, typography, and style of images and graphics. After the visual design, it's necessary to develop your brand collateral, including a website, business cards, social media pages, brochures, etc.
Business Strategy vs Brand Strategy
So, what is the main difference between business and Brand Strategy? The main difference is their approach.
First, the Brand Strategy focuses on creating a strong and memorable brand identity that shines in front of your target audience to help you achieve your goals. Then, there's a business strategy to achieve specific revenue and resource-related goals. Simply put, Brand Strategy focuses on building a brand identity; the other way around, Business Strategy focuses on how to make money. The Brand Strategy allows you to create a strong emotional connection with your target audience, while the Business Strategy executes specific tactics to achieve their goals.
Final Thoughts
After all, this rivalry makes sense (but just a little), considering that both strategies are necessary for any business model. The Brand Strategy is more related to the visual elements and how their union can create a solid identity with which users can interact. In addition, this strategy focuses on the emotional part that can develop between a brand and its users. The same occurs with Business Strategy, which has a more technical approach to how a company can generate more revenue and improve business performance. Developing a mind awareness that holds together the strengths and functional points of both marketing strategies is necessary. Still, there's a critical fact: you can't make a Brand Strategy without a successful Business Strategy, and vice-versa.
