The six BIG benefits of a brand strategy. (Part 2)

In the first of the series, I looked at three of the six reasons why brand strategy is becoming so important for CMO’s (a recent Gartner survey put brand strategy as their number one priority). I focused on brand strategy as a tool to drive internal alignment, to better manage resource allocation and, to define a direction or destination the whole company can get behind. (You can find that article here.)

In this second article, I’m going to look at how a brand strategy can help a business define its values, prioritise its focus and ensure it differentiates itself from others in its sector.

4. Values: The fourth big benefit of a brand strategy is that it allows you to distill your true character or values. Yes, we've now got a direction that we're all headed in, we all share a common view of what the brand stands for, and that allows us to define our values. The values deliver two very important things. Firstly, they act as a benchmark for your team to know if the activity is in line with the character and purpose of your brand and secondly, values act as an important hallmark for your customers to recognise you by.

5. Prioritisation: The brand strategy process delivers the fifth process benefit by allowing you to discover your key messages. In fact, more than that, it allows you to develop a hierarchy of your key messages so that you know what your most important message is. I call it the tyranny of the first. There's always going to be a first. A first chart in the presentation, the first headline on a website, and it's very important that you know what your first message is, and your second, third, fourth, and fifth. A brand strategy helps you to develop that hierarchy.

6. Differentiation: This brings us to our last big benefit - being relevant and different. You need to solve your customer’s problem, and you do that by demonstrating your benefits. But you also need to be different, you need to be distinct. If you're just relevant, it means you're the same as everybody else. If you're just different, you won't have any customers. You need to be both relevant and different.

So, those are the six benefits of a brand strategy, and six reasons why it is seen as such an essential part of a CMO’s marketing capabilities. For more on those benefits and to discover the building blocks of a good brand strategy do have a look at my new video series, which you can find here. into

Bruce M McKinnon is a Brand Strategist and author of the award-winning book ‘What’s Your Point?’ that can be purchased from Amazon. The book explores how brand strategy can fuel business growth, referencing some of the world’s most successful brands as well as sharing case studies from his own global consulting practice.