How to develop your brand's strategy
How Should You Develop a Brand Strategy?
If you’ve followed our content for a while, you know how we feel about brand strategy.
It’s one of the most important investments you can make as a brand, ensuring everything you do—from your visual identity to your communications and offerings—is thoughtful, strategic, and working toward a common goal.
But as important as brand strategy is, it can be a difficult thing to get done.
Because the work is foundational, it requires participation and buy-in from your organization’s leaders, many of whom have busy schedules and competing demands on their attention. Even when everyone’s aligned on the need, the logistics can be challenging.
That said, brand strategy projects can take a lot of different shapes depending on who you’re working with. So let’s take a look at a few of the more common formats to see which one might be right for you.
Bringing in Help
There are two basic models for developing a brand strategy.
You can hire someone to do it with you or you can hire someone to do it for you.
“Why can’t I do it myself?” you may be asking.
There are certainly parts of the process you can take on yourself, such as assessing your brand’s performance and aligning on an overall vision for your brand.
But when it comes to giving that vision a strategic shape specifically designed to support other brand assets like your messaging, visual identity, and marketing, it’s important to have an experienced brand professional guiding the process.
In addition to asking the important questions, experienced professionals are often in a better position to see the big picture and anticipate how your brand will function inside a competitive landscape.
So we suggest kicking off conversations about your brand internally (for example, by administering our free stakeholder survey), then hiring a professional to help you make and formalize key decisions.
Now, let’s talk about what that looks like.
Deliverable-Based Formats
Many brand professionals, including Green Gate, offer brand strategy as a “deliverable.”
The process for this typically involves a brand discovery meeting, wherein we speak with core stakeholders about your brand’s purpose, values, goals, and challenges.
We’ll then conduct additional research on your market and competitors before presenting you with a complete brand strategy, which we’ll discuss and adjust as needed.
This format is ideal for organizations seeking the full benefit of our strategic perspective because it allows us the time and space to become honorary experts in your market and craft a set of recommendations based on our experience, observations, and research.
The tradeoff, however, is timing and stakeholder involvement.
In addition to the initial discovery meeting and presentation, the same group of stakeholders needs to be available to review, provide feedback, and ultimately, approve the strategy we present.
Depending on stakeholders’ availability, this can occasionally lead to stalls in the process and a more protracted timeline.
This isn’t always a problem, and many organizations prefer the intermittent nature of a deliverable-based engagement. But if you’re in a hurry to develop a brand strategy so you can kick off projects like logo development, for example—or if you prefer a process that is more collaborative—there are other formats you may find more suitable.
Brand Strategy Workshops
Another format we’re excited to offer are brand strategy workshops.
These take place over a single day and are broken into multiple sessions, each of which is designed to help you make important decisions about your brand.
Sessions cover topics like:
Mission, Purpose & Values
Brand Objectives & Vision
Audience & Positioning
Brand Personality
Each one includes important context, inspiration, exercises, and discussions that will leave you feeling excited and energized.
The benefit of this format is that you’re able to develop a complete brand strategy in just one day. And because the process is engaged and collaborative, it ensures that stakeholders are aligned and understand the strategy, helping to expedite approval and, ultimately, implementation.
(The condensed timeline also allows for more competitive pricing.)
Which Is Right for You?
Both formats have their advantages and, depending on your organization’s needs and priorities, are equally valid for developing a brand strategy.
If you have questions or would like to talk through what makes the most sense for your brand, please reach out.
The longer we’re in business, the more convinced we are that brand strategy can help resolve many of the challenges brands face. We’re excited to make this critical service more accessible by offering different engagement options.
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