BRAND BLUEPRINT
BUILDING YOUR BRAND STRATEGY
A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.
Strong brands make a powerful emotional connection with their market. Learn how by understanding your buyer psychology, measuring your brand’s impact using modern data tools and creating messaging that inspires your market.
Our consultants will work with your marketing team and brand stakeholders, diligently going through each module to obtain the best results for your business.
In-Person Sessions
What’s in the Blueprint?
Brand Inspiration
Make an emotional connection with your buyers. Learn elements of the emerging field of behavioral economics, how beliefs influence buying behavior, and align what you stand for with what your buyers care about.
In This Module, You’ll Determine…
- Brand Type & Structure
- Your Standard What, How, Why Communication
- Core Values
- Supporting Stories Exemplifying Your Values
- Brand Purpose
- Buyer Personas
- What Inspires Your Personas
- New Inspirational Why, How, What Communication
Typical Participants for Brand Inspiration
Each sessions asks challenging questions, the answers of which will be foundational elements of the brand. The marketing team can create these, but core brand stakeholders should signoff. For small brands, these could be the business owner or executive team. For larger companies, these can be brand managers, VPs or general managers.
Time to Complete Brand Inspiration
This is a half-day session to address each element the first time through. You can’t always make core strategic decisions in a compressed timeframe, so you may need to revisit this work over the course of two to three weeks. You can choose to iterate on each session before moving to the next, or come back to it after completing Brand Differentiation, Brand Positioning and Brand Architecture.
Brand Differentiation
Without differentiation, you’re selling a commodity and have to compete on price – or your brand will stagnate or die.
But how do you create true brand differentiation?
Some brands are able to create competitive advantages through differentiation, even though their product or service alone is the same as, or possibly inferior to, the majority of the other options available in the marketplace.
Here you’ll learn the nuances of brand differentiation to understand how to uncover the strengths of your brand as part of your brand strategy. After analyzing your strengths, you’ll learn how to communicate them using specific criteria which can turn them into competitive advantages in the mind of your buyer.
In This Module, You’ll Determine…
- Your Competitor Profiles
- The Rating Criteria Most Important to Your Buyer Personas
- How You Compare in the Competitive Matrix
- Your Market’s Ability to Delight
- Your Brand’s Ability to Delight
- Your Brand’s Strengths
- Your Brand’s Differentiating Strengths
- Which Key Criteria Apply to Your Differentiating Strengths
- Your Current Competitive Advantages to Use for Differentiation
- Your Potential Competitive Advantages to Use for Differentiation
Typical Participants for Brand Differentiation
This module asks challenging questions, the answers of which will be differentiating elements of the brand. The marketing team can create these, but core brand stakeholders should sign off. For small brands, these could be the business owner or executive team. For larger companies, these can be brand managers, VPs or general managers.
Time to Complete Brand Differentiation
This is a two to four-hour session to address each element the first time through. You can’t always make core strategic decisions in a compressed timeframe, so you may need to revisit this work over the course of two to three weeks. You can choose to iterate on this module before moving to the next, or come back to it after completing Brand Positioning, Brand Architecture, and Brand Audit.
Brand Positioning
Positioning, or owning a space in the mind of your buyer, is more important today than it was decades ago when Jack Trout and Al Ries introduced the concept.
We’re in the middle of communication revolution, created by technology, but driven by human behavior. As we become over-burdened with information, our minds seek to simply, to categorize and to protect ourselves from stimulus overload. We position everything we encounter that is new, and rarely change that perception after our initial decision.
Agencies and the Fortune 500 have leveraged brand positioning for decades, but it’s still new to many early-career marketers and executives at small to mid-size companies.
In This Module, You’ll Determine…
- Market Share, by Revenue and/or Unit Sales
- Market Trends
- Market Lifecycle Stage
- Appropriate Positioning Approach for Market Lifecycle
- Method for Delivering Value
- Current Mindshare Owned
- Mindshare Desired to Own
- Mindshare Map
Typical Participants for Brand Positioning
This module asks challenging questions, the answers of which will be foundational elements of the brand. The marketing team can create these, but core brand stakeholders should sign off. For small brands, these could be the business owner or executive team. For larger companies, these can be brand managers, VPs or general managers.
Time to Complete Brand Positioning
This is two- to four-hour session to address each element the first time through. You can’t always make core strategic decisions in a compressed timeframe, so you may need to revisit this work over the course of two to three weeks. You can choose to iterate on this module before moving to the next, or come back to it after completing Brand Architecture, and Brand Audit.
Brand Architecture
A brand is more than a logo or packaging; it’s an experience that is shaped by a combination of many things.
Your brand experience is shaped by your product or service, your creative, your logo, your messaging and how the people that represent your brand interact with your market and customers, including salespeople, customer service and support and the people performing services. Your brand is a perception, and that perception is reinforced every time you touch your market.
Effective brand strategies are clearly understood and adhered to by everyone involved with acquiring and maintaining customers. For many companies, that includes executives, the sales team, the marketing team, the customer service team and your hiring team.
Here you will determine the key elements of your brand to create a unified brand experience that can be repeated to inspire, differentiate and position you in the mind of your buyers.
In This Module, You’ll Determine…
- Brand Hierarchy
- Functional and Emotional Benefits that Cause Behavior Change
- Three Things Your Brand Means to Your Buyer Personas
- Brand Personality Traits
- The Brand Experience to Deliver at Each Touchpoint
- Brand Positioning Statement
- Elements for Your Brand Story
- The Operational Brand Experience to Deliver at Each Touchpoint
Typical Participants for Brand Architecture
This module focuses on the structure of your brand. Include your brand stakeholders and your creative team. For small brands, the stakeholders could be the business owner or executive team. For larger companies, these can be brand managers or marketing leaders.
Time to Complete Brand Architecture
This is half-day session to address each element the first time through. You can’t always make creative decisions in a compressed timeframe, so you may need to revisit this work over the course of two to three weeks. You can choose to iterate on this module before moving to the next, or come back to it after completing Brand Audit.
Brand Audit
- If you’re creating a new brand, how do you ensure that you deliver a consistent experience across every market touchpoint?
If you’re managing an existing brand, you’re already creating a perception in the marketplace. How well does that represent your new brand strategy?
After you’ve defined your brand inspiration, brand differentiation, brand position, and brand architecture – you have established measurement criteria to evaluate how well your existing messaging, campaigns and creative material represent your brand. Your brand audit, or new brand checklist, provides a guide for creating a unified brand experience in the future.
In This Module, You’ll Determine…
- Visual Brand Touchpoints
- Operational Brand Touchpoints
- Internal Brand Creative Assessment
- External Brand Creative Assessment
- Internal Brand Operational Assessment
- External Brand Operational Assessment
- Brand Audit Score
- Gap Analysis
- Brand Update Schedule
Typical Participants for Brand Audit
The lead brand stakeholder, sales and marketing leaders and the creative team. Include any copywriters and designers in this module. This is where you start determining what your creative elements should represent.
Time to Complete Brand Audit
This module requires a review and analysis of creative work and obtaining market feedback; the time to complete it will vary depending on the size of your market and resources. The review and survey work should take anywhere from a fews days to a few weeks.
Brand Strategy Implementation
A strategy is something you can touch; you can motivate people with it and energize people around the message.
And a great strategy is useless without a plan for execution.
Here you will create your brand strategy implementation plan by establishing your brand’s vision and big idea and determining how to deliver your brand to the marketplace, along with establishing your 12-month sequence of actions to implement your strategy in your daily marketing activities.
You’ll also be introduced to some concepts from the emerging fields of behavioral economics and data science to measure your brand’s impact in the marketplace.
In This Module, You’ll Determine…
- SWOT
- Brand Vision
- Your Big Idea
- Where to Use Each Element of Your Brand Strategy
- Action Items for Each Brand Strategy Element
- Tactics to Leverage Behavioral Economics
- Data Science Actions for CAC and CLV
- Data Science Actions for Brand Measurement
- Data Science Actions for Customer Acquisition and Retention Stages
Typical Participants for Brand Strategy Implementation
This module requires input from your lead brand stakeholder, creative team and members of the marketing team. You may also want to include members of your technical and/or financial team during the data science portion of this module.
Time to Complete Brand Strategy Implementation
This module requires an understanding of your entire brand strategy, along with the ability to set a brand vision. You may wish to schedule this module in one or two sessions to set the vision and big idea, and then handle the tactical work over a longer period of time.
BONUS MODULE
Brand Naming
Your brand name is the most visible and memorable part of your brand. After people experience your brand, they attach their feelings to your brand name each time they see or hear it.
Brand naming is something that every entrepreneur and marketer have participated in. But most have brainstormed in an unstructured manner, which sometimes causes you to miss out on the opportunities to explore better names to fit your brand.
Here you’ll learn about the different categories of names and how to apply them to your brand strategy, along with a step-by-step brainstorming process and the procedure for evaluating and protecting your final name selections. It all works together to help you choose a great brand name!
In This Module, You’ll Determine…
- Level of Importance of Brand Name
- Resources to Use in the Creative Process
- Type of Brand Your Name Will Represent
- The Four Name Categories to Consider
- Competitor Name Map
- Name Creativity Requirements
- Naming Criteria and Importance Level
- Names to Evaluate
- Name Protection to Pursue
Typical Participants for Brand Naming
This module requires an understanding of your entire brand strategy. It requires input from your lead brand stakeholder, creative team and members of the marketing team.
Time to Complete Brand Naming
This module will be completed over the course of days or weeks, not hours. You may wish to schedule this session after your team produces creative results for you to evaluate.