Jun 17, 2010

A roadmap of aligning the brand to the business strategy!

As the business world grows, businesses and consumers become more competitive. With competition there comes an increasing drive for success. Aligning your brand to your strategy comes from narrowing the brand focus, great leadership, dedicated and valued employees, customer loyalty and a strategic plan.
The reality is that if anyone wants to create a strong brand, it is the leader’s responsibility to keep the brand promise. Brand value and customer loyalty come from the smart and disciplined leaders who implement brand strategy and model branding in everyday action. Basically “Integrated branding is the process of revealing the brand promise, then aligning the entire organization to deliver that promise.”
Branding is not just marketing or corporate identity function, it is something that lives in every experience a customer has with the company. The goal of integrated branding is to create a company that consistently and carefully devise and delivers to the consumers the initial brand promise. In fact a brand must be built on the company’s actual strengths rather than a painted on mask. Integrated branding is the chance for organizations to put their goals in to practice and achieve their vision.
Brand Strategy is the guideline that a company uses to build its integrated brand. An effective brand strategy deals with all of the ways a company plan to improve customers experience and satisfaction. It includes aligning not just the marketing department but all departments with the integrated brand. It focuses on things that need to be changed and the priorities and timeline for that change. The goal of a brand strategy is to capture the hearts and minds of your customers and lead them to the loyalty and commitment levels of brand equity.
One of the most important things is however; company must also keep the brand core consistent.What’s unique about a company’s approach to customers that shouldn’t change? If she consistently uses its strategic role, brand principle, personality and values over a period of year, it will build defensible differentiation.
In order to establish brand clarity, one has to know who they are as a company. Companies have to do research on this matter. Ask customers, prospects, employees, partners, analysts, and vendors. Hence, Sort through research to discover the brand assets of the company. The full benefit of integrated branding can’t be achieved until all employees are living it.
Company activity alignment focuses on creating a company filled with leaders leading from the brand and employees executing it. This requires leaders becoming brand evangelists as well as setting up employee compensation systems rewarding brand-based behavior, hiring based on branding, organizing company processes and designing products and services to reflect the brand.
Tell the world who the company is? Brand based communication, via logos, ad campaigns, collateral, taglines, brand characters, colors, public relations, direct mail and Web sites, delivers different brand tools consisting of verbal and visual tools. Effective communication of company’s brand will help promote the marketing efforts, proving that the brand message is true, effective and consistent.

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