WHAT IS BRAND STRATEGY?
(A TSW Communications Information Leaflet)
At some point the word 'brand' escaped from the ad industry and wandered off into the wider world, where it was captured, domesticated, and eventually reduced to meaning a logo, a colour palette, and perhaps a website featuring photographs of attractive people laughing at salads, which is understandable because the visible parts are always easier to talk about than the invisible parts, and nobody points at a building and says ‘Look at the load-bearing calculations'.
But why do some businesses become the obvious choice while others remain permanently overlooked? Why do some names seem to arrive in people's minds at exactly the right moment, while others have to spend their entire existence introducing themselves?
A customer standing in front of a shelf, scrolling through a feed, asking a friend for a recommendation, or driving past a row of competing businesses is not conducting an academic evaluation, and they are not opening a spreadsheet and comparing seventeen variables before arriving at a perfectly rational conclusion, because something else is happening, something that involves fragments colliding and things half remembered and things noticed years ago and a story somebody told them and a sign they drove past a hundred times and a recommendation from a neighbour and a feeling they cannot quite explain, and most buying decisions emerge from this strange accumulation of lipstick traces, which means that whether you have thought about it or not, your business is already occupying some kind of position in people's minds.
Accidents occasionally produce something brilliant but if you were constructing a bridge across a river, or a distillery, or an aircraft, you would probably be reluctant to place too much faith in accidental outcomes, and you would want at least some idea of where you were going before you started pouring concrete.
Yet many businesses are surprisingly comfortable allowing the market to invent their identity for them, so customers will decide what they think, and competitors will decide what they compare you against, and employees will decide what stories they tell, and the local community will decide what role you play, and eventually all of these decisions accumulate into something that acquires a strange kind of solidity, which is a reputation.
Brand strategy is the decision to become involved in that process before everybody else makes up their minds for you. Leaving something this important entirely to chance feels like an odd way to run a business, particularly when every other part of the business is planned with such care, and nobody would say ‘We've decided not to bother with a financial strategy, let's see what happens’, yet many organisations are perfectly content to drift through the world hoping people somehow arrive at the right conclusion about who they are, what they do, and why they matter.
(This leaflet may self-destruct. No refunds.)