Logos And Imagery—The Brand Strategy Myth

Brand strategy versus business strategy? They are, ultimately, the same thing, with the goal of defining the optimum position in the market and customers’ heads and hearts.

There is a widely circulated myth that brand strategy is associated with imagery, logos, and the construction and promotion of marketing messages. But brand is so much more than that, and any business, marketer, or brand that thinks otherwise is not only wrong but failing to understand the true value of what brand actually is.

Brand strategy is, ultimately, business strategy, and all about defining the optimum position a business can adopt in its market and in the heads and hearts of everyone it wants to touch and positively influence. It’s also about ensuring that absolutely everyone inside and outside the organisation delivers against it, until the brand custodians pre-empt changes in customer requirements and behaviour. Those changes ultimately need to be addressed in order for that influence to continue and the business to grow and develop in new emerging markets or attract new customer sets.

Total Ownership

To succeed, brand strategy cannot be influenced by a few drivers, it has to be influenced by, and therefore influence, the whole organisation and its markets.

It should not be exclusively owned by the marketing department. With so many organisations struggling to break down silos in their organisations, isolating one of the most important assets of the business to a sole department is only going to breed more issues—especially when brand runs through all company departments.

Brand strategy should be the high watermark of visionary strategic thinking in today’s, and tomorrow’s, organisations. If CMOs want to be influential and occupy a critical role in the C-suite of their companies, they MUST understand the brand they represent properly. In other words, they need to see it as a business, change, and leadership strategy and the informer for future business strategy.

The logo, identity, website, and other brand assets are merely just vehicles through which the overall brand strategy can be effectively communicated to the right audience. Whilst this may require a degree of organisational restructure and a culture shift internally, this mindset is crucial to fostering change and the development of an effective overarching brand strategy.

Brand Determines CX

The concept of brand has always been the ultimate determinant of customer experience and sees the customer at the heart of everything. In an environment, where more and more consumer-facing businesses are investing in customer-centric board appointments such as customer director, brand has never been more pertinent.

So why, when the concept of brand has existed for generations, are some organisations only now waking up to this fact?

In my view, it comes back to a lack of understanding about what brand actually is. It has oversight on everything and every line of business; on the business itself, its people, culture, strategies, innovations, products—oh, and sales and marketing too. It is a true driver for differentiation, competitive advantage, value propositions, and customer experience.

Not only that—it’s also the driver for everything else that’s important, including defining organisational change, customer needs and strategy, future talent and capabilities development, investor relations and business asset value growth. When you combine all these elements together, it all links to truth—real truth, not “fake truth.” It’s lasting, not transient.

If all those people out there discussing customer experience stop for a moment and focus, instead, on the things that have always been true, we might see the creation of good customer experiences. Rather than reinventing things for the sake of it, businesses should focus on what’s always been the truth—customer experience has always been one key driver for brand strategy and brand strategy has always been the driver for business strategy.

By making brand strategy—not branding, customer experience, marketing, data, technology and so—the centre of the universe, brands will be better able to orchestrate (conduct) all these things AND add considerably wider and deeper value to their entire changing organisation. What does that mean in principal? To be successful, you have to be truly strategic and utterly non-partisan.