From big idea to big strategy

A good brand strategy is an investment case

Everyone’s talking about brand strategy at the moment.

It’s coming up a lot in the Brand Leadership course I teach – we explored it from many angles last term. And it’s coming up in my new life as an independent brand consultant. My old colleague Morgan Holt, now at Landor & Fitch, was talking about it last week. And Mark Ritson’s latest column tackles it head on.

Like every concept in the Lewis Carroll world of branding, ‘brand strategy’ has no fixed meaning.

But what I’ve come to realise in the last six months is that brand strategy should be an investment case. Companies should see branding as a long-term investment, not a short-term cost, and brand strategy should justify that investment.

Brand strategies often simply sum up the collection of ideas a company wants its brand to stand for – things like purpose, proposition and personality. This is the ‘big idea’ I’ve written about. It’s useful, but my clients these days are asking for more. Not just ‘what should my brand be like?’ but also ‘how do I convince my colleagues that this matters?’ and ‘what are the best new ways of building a brand?’

For me, a brand strategy should answer these three questions.

Why should we invest in brand?

What’s our business ambition, and how can brand help? How significant should our investment in brand be: do we want to be a brand-led or a brand-supported business? What’s the potential return on our investment?

What brand should we invest in?

One or many? What kind of brand: authentic, plain, story-rich, collaborative, nostalgic, political, cult-like, slick, organic, consistent, dynamic, or what? Which kinds of customers and employees are we for? What do we want to achieve with them? How different should we be from our rivals? What story do we want our stakeholders to construct about us?

How should we spread our investment?

This isn’t about the four Ps (that’s just marketing). These are longer-term investments in innovation, customer experience, community-building, collaborations, leadership and learning. What are the priorities? What are the risks and returns? How will we manage it all? What kinds of skills and agencies will we need? How will we measure and learn?

But back now to reality. Next week, my students start on their real live client projects. For the next four months, they’ll be constructing brand strategies for an ambitious airline, for an enthusiastic artisan olive oil producer in Tuscany, for a pioneering network of engineering businesses, and for an ingenious start-up that aims to eliminate plastic packaging from our lives, starting with shampoo.

After a term of theory, the students will now be making real brand strategies, answering those three questions, to guide their clients for the next five years or more. And we’ll all learn a lot – including, I’m sure, ways to improve on my new definition of ‘brand strategy’.

We can’t wait to get started.