PBL task 5 - Creating a Brand Strategy

Task 5A;

Problem: Brand strategy

1. Define brand strategy - include elements and importance of strategies.

"decision-making for the effective handling of brands; three general branding strategies are available - a single brand for all of the organisation's products, family branding, or the use of individual brand names for all products." (source)

 Five Key Brand Elements:

·         Brand Position
The Brand Position is the part of the brand that describes what your organization does and for whom, what your unique value is and how a customer benefits from working with you or your product/service, and what key differentiation you have from your competition. Once you've defined your brand position, make it available in 25, 50, and 100 word versions.

·         Brand Promise
The Brand Promise is the single most important thing that the organization promises to deliver to its customers—EVERY time. To come up with your brand promise, consider what customers, employees, and partners should expect from every interaction with you. Every business decision should be weighed against this promise to be sure that a) it fully reflects the promise, or b) at the very least it does not contradict the promise.

·         Brand Personality
Brand Traits illustrate what the organization wants its brand to be known for. Think about specific personality traits you want prospects, clients, employees, and partners to use to describe your organization. You should have 4-6 traits (5 is ideal), each being a single term (usually an adjective).

·         Brand Story
The Brand Story illustrates the organization's history, along with how the history adds value and credibility to the brand. It also usually includes a summary of your products or services.

·         Brand Associations
Brand Associations are the specific physical artifacts that make up the brand. This is your name, logo, colors, taglines, fonts, imagery, etc. Your brand associations must reflect your brand promise, ALL of your brand traits, and support your brand positioning statement.

·         source

Importance of strategies:

2. What are the arguments for internal and external brand strategy development - use examples.

While many companies do not use the words internal branding, all of the interviewees were 

able to describe the activities that build the bridge between strategy and execution. They 

used expressions such as: 

• Living the corporate values. 

• Leveraging the corporate brand strategy to reinforce brand requirements internally 

and reach out to potential recruits externally. 

• Activities, processes and communication involved in empowering associates. 

• Create and demonstrate consistent brand experience at all touch points. 

Based on these interviews and additional reading we would suggest the following definition 

for ”internal branding”: 

Internal branding is the set of strategic processes that align and empower employees 

to deliver the appropriate customer experience in a consistent fashion. These 

processes include, but are not limited to, internal communications, training support, 

leadership practices, reward & recognition programs, recruitment practices and 

sustainability factors. 

source

External Opportunities and Threats

Situational analyses consider opportunities and threats from the external environment. External opportunities include things such as gaps in the market that no company is currently serving, new markets and other clear growth opportunities. External threats include new product releases from competitors and new competitors arising in the market.

A range of external factors can present either opportunities or threats, depending on the specifics. Changes in the law, for example, can provide distinct opportunities to some businesses in an industry while threatening the survival of others. Changing consumer preferences and market-changing new product categories, as another example, can give new entrepreneurs a world of opportunities while seriously threatening established brands.

source

Task 5B;

Problem: Brand architecture

1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of different brand architecture/strategy/models?

- Why do companies use different ones? eg. Apple vs Nestle.

All these brand strategies have advantages and disadvantages to each model. All companies would have to use different methods purely due to the fact that their outcome is going to be different.

For example, Apple's brand is aimed towards people that can afford to spend a lot of money on their products, none of which are cheap. That means that they would earn a lot more money and their profit margin would be higher. They would then be able to spend the profit on making better products and improving their marketing techniques and adverts.

Nestle, however, have a lot of sub-categories such as Kit-Kat, Nescafe coffee and Pure Life bottled water. This shows that they provide a wide range of products for their consumers, showing how diverse they are. Their branding strategy would be based more on families.

They're both different as they are targeting different markets and they have different associations, stories, promises, positions and personalities.