Design of a brand strategy: how to be recognized and continue to be recognized in a noisy world

Whether you sell to consumers, contractors, or large corporations, your customers are bombarded with messages every day. In this environment, companies cannot assume that potential customers, or even old customers, know everything about them. Companies must find a message that strongly conveys their added value. In many cases, they must also manage a portfolio of brands sold through a variety of distribution channels. To help companies develop winning strategies that meet the needs of multiple customer segments, Smart Business spoke with Bob Segal, director of Frank Lynn & Associates Inc. and leader of the company’s brand strategy practice.

What does it mean for a brand to communicate added value?

More than 60 years ago, psychologist Abraham Maslow described the needs of consumers using a pyramid with basic needs such as food or sleep at the bottom and higher-level needs such as gaining knowledge, being creative or contributing to society at the top. . We have developed a similar approach on the business-to-business side, emphasizing higher-level needs such as improving customer productivity, lowering their life cycle costs, or helping them develop new products. For consumers or corporations, adding value means linking your brand to these higher-level needs.

Is it enough to simply link your brand to these high-level needs?

A successful brand position must satisfy three conditions: it must be unique, compelling, and credible. Linking your brand to a compelling customer need in a unique way is a good start. However, many companies fail in the implementation phase when credibility is proven or disproved.

Can you give us an example?

For one of our business-to-business clients, we developed a position that emphasized how the business works closely with its clients to reduce production setup time and costs. The customer used a variety of in-house means to educate their employees on reducing installation time at their own manufacturing facilities, created cost reduction teams between employees and customers, and even created an installation time reduction institute in their website.

Even if you have a unique, compelling and credible position, how do you get your message across in such a “noisy” environment?

The key to getting your company’s message across is developing an integrated marketing effort. You need to coordinate your advertising, website, brochures, dealer training and motivation, employee communications, word of mouth, and telemarketing scripts. Then you need to translate all of this into a campaign that is focused on specific and specific customer groups or segments.

We talked before about the client’s needs. What can a business do if it has a diverse set of customers with different needs?

In the world of branding, we usually talk about brand architecture. This concept addresses how many brands a company requires and the relationship between those brands. My default position is, the fewer marks the better. Using a single brand costs less, is easier to manage internally, and easier to understand externally.

However, your question is astute because many markets today are fragmented. We have a customer who sells nail guns to consumers, contractors, and industrial users. Each of these groups is made up of several subsets. In a perfect world, you would expand your unique brand to cover all of those groups. In reality, it is difficult to find a single compelling message for such diverse groups. Many companies often develop new brands when a single brand simply does not expire. Toyota’s launch of the Lexus brand is a classic example.

How does a multi-brand company consistently communicate different messages to different markets?

The answer is complex, but one key is carefully coordinating which brands are sold through which distribution channels. In my Toyota / Lexus example, Toyota recognized that the premium or luxury message it wanted to communicate with its Lexus brand would be undermined by the middle-class nature of its existing dealerships. To carry the Lexus brand, Toyota required its dealers to establish separate Lexus brand dealerships that exuded the image of luxury.

Can’t companies just outsource their branding work to advertising or public relations agencies?

Some agencies do stellar work. However, many agencies, particularly those that work for smaller companies, are often more comfortable designing brochures or writing press releases than developing general branding strategies. Brand strategy reflects the overall mission of a company and the vision of the CEO. While advisors can help, the true success of any branding strategy is creating an idea that uniquely and credibly solves the pressing problems of key customers.