Synergy between you brand and business is critical to business success yet often it is overlooked. A core differentiator I often see in successful businesses is tightly aligned business and brand strategy.
As a brand strategist I have over 20 years experience of helping start up and large multinationals develop strong brands that delivers engaged customers.
Developing synergy between your brand and your business means more than creating and adopting a common vision and mission, or simply defining your Why, How and What and then leaving it in a powerpoint file.
Its about holistically looking at the ambition of the business, its founders and leaders goals and setting the brand in action as a tool to deliver to these goals. This starts with challenging your biases and adopting a collective approach to thinking - this means taking a 360 view of the business, your brand and your objectives then assessing customer needs and cultural opportunities. In doing this you can set a strong plan based on real insights and align all teams behind a common vision and strategy. Really taking the time to understand not only what the business wants but what culture is dictating and what consumers and prospects want from your business.
By setting out your business strategy based on collective thinking you will clearly see where your brand needs to step up and the role for marketing. It is from this that you can develop a a brand plan for how the business acts, where communications are required, how it looks and how it wants to interact with employees and customers the business is creating something to believe in and developing a story that will add weight, meaning and difference to the services or product it sells.
Aligning the brand with the business will ensure all parts are working together and not against each other and this means better agility and friction-less business.
At Think Collectiv we offer 5 ways to engage with us to get real clarity around your business, brand, customers and marketing. Each programme we develop is bespoke and it sets to answer a problem that is holding back business, for example you might have the best product in a market but no brand for people to buy into, or you might not be targeting the right customers, or you might be merging a number of brand and need to realign you brand efforts behind a single vision and take your management team on the journey.
Some important checks you can do to assess if your brand and business is out of sync:
1) Beyond the product you sell or service you deliver - why does your business exist and what does it stand for? Are you telling a story? If you were a customer why would you choose your product or service?
2) If you have got a statement written for the above - well done. Now think about what you know about your customers? Do you really know who they are? Do you know why they buy? what the motivator? whats the trigger? who are your most profitable customers?
3) Do your people live and breath by the above? What answers you have written? Are your people delivering a unified voice?
4) Join the dots pull together the above 3 areas and think about how you can take away any friction or gaps in delivery or problems that are stopping growth - these actions are are brand actions,
You now have a very simple brand strategy statement and actions and you can create a plan to align your business with your audiences, your people and the market. You should have been able to commit to a single idea - one thing that you can continually deliver, an idea that your brand must never fail to deliver, you can now plan how each part of your business delivers this simple idea and how this works to deliver business strength.
If you have any problems writing the above 2 statements, its not as easy as it sounds... I know, or feel there are gaps than you could do with some help in closing to get your brand working harder for you. Get in touch with Think Collectiv and get your free 2 hour brand and business alignment assessment - no obligation. It will be your first step to a better business and stronger brand.
