Positive branding is a strategy used by most corporate marketing teams and it may be the critical component in marketing. The long-term positive effects on the bottom line have been significant if the branding effort were successful. Lesser understood is the essence of this success: Brand Integrity. This is unlike the classic rule of advertising where, as long as the viewer remembers your name, it doesn't matter whether they loved or hated your advertising message. Your brand is useless, or worse, if it doesn't build integrity in your products and services. Here are some steps to improve your brand integrity.
Instructions
1. Learn the difference between branding, image creation and enhancement. Many veteran management teams equate branding with the wide display of their name, logo, slogan, and/or trademark. However, experts understand that image is only one component of designing and executing an effective brand strategy.
2. List all components of your brand strategy, including image information, company mission statement, corporate goals, marketing strategy, current position in your industry, and desired customer reaction to your identity, as well as the reaction of potential customers.
3. Integrate all facets of your branding strategy into a cohesive plan. The most important element of an effective brand strategy, once you've identified all the elements included therein, is the planning process.
4. Ask yourself, or your team, the "hard" questions. How can we best represent our commitment to excellence of products, services, customer satisfaction, reasonable pricing, reliability, and quality in a "picture" or repetitive message? The answers will determine how you decide to focus your branding strategy and the method of its delivery.
5. Design an effective message and program to publicize your resulting branding decision. Make the decision to totally commit to the agreed upon method of marketing your brand. Since brand integrity can only be established over time and with excellent performance, a full commitment is critical to success.
6. Clearly state the components of your brand and the methods of delivery to all employees. Staff must "buy into" the quality level you'd like your brand to represent to have a positive effect on your brand integrity. Promises delivered by even the best branding strategy are effectively useless unless you deliver on them.
7. Evaluate, evaluate, and evaluate. Use a variety of methods to determine the success or failure of your branding strategy to learn if your brand integrity is increasing. Market surveys, gross sales, customer feedback and other published third party comments all contribute to an effective evaluation of your brand strategy. Coordinate the information you compile to make an honest assessment of the improvement in your brand integrity.
8. Admit that there is no "perfect" branding strategy. You must commit to make promises that reflect all components of your brand and then ensure that your products and staff follow up to deliver on those promises. If you can deliver both your message and its promises to your customer base in an effective manner, you will improve your brand integrity, which is the key to long term stability and success.
Tags: your brand, branding strategy, your brand integrity, brand strategy, brand integrity