Article
Brand strategy is the most vital marketing asset
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The House of Marketing
“Brand strategy is the most important marketing competency”: that is the finding of recent research among CMOs by Gartner. But how do you achieve a good ‘brand strategy’? Here are the two main lessons that we often apply in our consulting practice:
1. Choose wisely
Strategy means above all choosing what not to do. These are often very difficult choices, but necessary for focus. Keep asking yourself every morning in the shower, “what else can I kill?”. Idiots create and then create more. Good marketers keep cutting.
2. Keep it simple
Keep positioning simple: what are the three domains you want to claim in the mind of the target audience? The next possible diagnosis and making the right choices are the complex phase in arriving at the brand strategy. Once that is done, you want everyone in the company to understand what the positioning means and you want them to be able to act hierarchically.
“So many poorly managed brands have layer upon layer of positioning. Brand essence leads to brand DNA, which turns into brand values and then brand purpose and then brand attributes and tone of voice and character and wanky wanky wank wank. There are so many layers, each with so many nonsensical words, that no one within the company, let alone the consumers the brand ultimately hopes to target, has any idea what the brand actually stands for.”
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