It takes a lot of strategy to bring a brand with strong recognition to market. Think of some brands that become generic words for a type of product—Kleenex as a tissue,  Xerox as a photocopy, and even Google has become the verb to use when looking for answers online. Companies don’t get this type of brand recognition without a strong brand strategy.

Brand recognition indicates your company has a reputation for its tone, logo, messaging, and even its culture. But, if you feel like your brand is unrecognizable within its market or unfocused, your brand strategy might need some work.

And you’ll have to go beyond creating a shiny new logo—you’ll need a data-driven, thoughtful brand strategy. This ultimate guide aims to help you develop a successful brand strategy.

A comprehensive brand strategy can supercharge a company’s success and make it instantly recognizable to the masses. But great brand strategies don’t appear out of thin air. You’ll have to meticulously plan out every element if you want to deliver effective branding.

In this ultimate guide to brand strategy, we’ll explore the following areas to help you create a winning brand strategy:

Let’s dive right in. 

Brand strategy is a plan that allows a business to improve its recognizability with customers and increase its overall visibility. A thoughtful, clear brand strategy touches every part of your organization. It allows your company to cultivate an image, messaging, and persona that connects with your audience and differentiates you from competitors.

Brand strategy will contain elements that help you reach your long-term business objectives—whether it be entering a new market, launching a new product, or refreshing your brand. 

A common misconception is that your logo, product, or even your website is your brand. A brand is much more than just visuals. It’s composed of many intangible elements. Your brand strategy will involve managing these brand elements over time.

A good brand strategy contains the following elements: 

Brand strategy is an art that you can develop over time.

Brand strategy allows your business to create a clear public persona. Your branding will inform how you present yourself to the world. In turn, this will impact how customers see you and whether or not they want to do business with you.

Marketing professionals can use brand strategy to stand out from the crowd. Stronger branding will also make it easier for customers to identify and support your company. There are numerous benefits of brand strategy:

Brand strategy is important as it offers your business all these and more. Strong branding is key for teams looking to streamline their customer retention, improve acquisitions, and increase revenue. 

Every individual element of your brand strategy will come together to make one comprehensive whole. Take a holistic approach when developing your brand strategy, including as many of these elements as possible.

The choices you make when forming each of your brand strategy elements will impact marketing and PR campaigns in the future. For example, the company voice you choose will influence the language you write ads in. 

Let’s explore some of the most important brand strategy attributes and what they mean:

Your brand purpose is the motivation that lies behind why your company exists. Beyond just making a profit, it’s the core factor that drives you and your employees.

Your purpose is one of the first things your brand will establish. It will inform your voice, target audience, values, and almost every other brand strategy element.

Every brand has a selection of brand values that they abide by. These brand values influence everything from the internal company culture to the trajectory that a business takes.

Typically, businesses publish their core brand values to allow the public and potential job applicants to see them. Creating and abiding by brand values helps to ground the other elements of your brand strategy. 

Your brand vision, sometimes called brand mission, is an extension of your brand purpose. Your vision is a picture of how you want the future to be, often with your outline of how you’ll help move toward that vision.

A brand vision represents a real-world application of your brand purpose. A clear brand vision will help connect businesses with the reality of their actions. Many companies focus on improving areas of society, like access to healthcare, education, or technology.

Defining your target audience is another important aspect of your brand strategy. Your target audience will influence how you try and connect to them. For example, a company with an audience of between 20 and 30 would address them differently than 75+ year-olds.

By understanding your target audience, you can better create, structure, and implement your brand strategy. The brand experience you offer will change depending on the target audience you outline.

Your brand voice is the tone, style, and form that you use when creating written communications for your business. Everywhere you use text, whether that’s your home website or in an email, will reflect this brand voice.

Depending on your core values and target audience, your brand voice will vary.

The most successful companies in the world all share one thing: a strong brand strategy. No matter the sector, leading enterprises are instantly recognizable. When you explore these brands, you’ll find clear motivations, long-term visions, and core values.

Let’s explore some examples of brand strategy in action.

Nike’s brand strategy began with one slogan. The instantly recognizable “Just do it” may be one of the leading slogans across the globe. Their slogan encompasses its mission statement, aiming to empower absolutely anyone to appreciate the joy of movement.

Here’s why Nike’s brand strategy works:

Starbucks is one of the most recognizable brands on the planet, with its color scheme, logo, and commitment to good coffee being memorable to its audience. Yet, going beyond its visual elements, Starbucks uses its brand values and vision to connect with its target audience.

Here’s why Starbucks’ brand strategy works:

Apple greatly focuses its brand strategy around a set of core values. Everything they do and all communications they push through marketing channels reflect these values. Apple’s commitment to its own values and design choices makes it instantly recognizable. 

Here’s why Apple’s brand strategy works:

Understanding the power of a brand strategy is one thing; creating your own strategy is another. A great brand strategy doesn’t appear overnight. It takes careful planning and market research.

Here’s how you can build a brand strategy:

Before you begin to build your brand strategy, you need to determine your company’s purpose. Your business exists to do more than simply make money—what other reason does your company have for being? What value do you provide to your customers beyond your products or services? 

The goal of making money and turning a profit doesn’t set you apart from your competition. After all, that’s one of the goals of every business. Determining what else you stand for helps you decide how to stand out.

Next, you need to understand your market and your consumers deeply in order to build a brand strategy. You need to tailor your brand to your audience in order to connect with them, so it’s vital to figure out what they value. There is a variety of research you can do to understand your markets. At the very least, learn more about market research and how it can help you with segmentation, brand tracking, and market intelligence.

Knowing as much about your competitors as possible is key. This can help you determine where you fit into the market. It can also help identify where there are opportunities for your business. Get the lay of your industry landscape by uncovering competitive insights to build your brand strategy.

Finally, create a brand strategy framework with clear and measurable goals. (Don’t worry, we’ll cover much more on how to measure your success later in this guide.) 

Your goals should align clearly with your overall business goals. They should also incorporate all of your branding elements into one concise guide for your whole organization.

Market research is one of the most important components of your brand strategy. If you don’t understand your market and your audience, how will you know which brand will resonate and connect with them effectively? 

After all, a brand isn’t just about your business. It’s also about the relationship between your business and your customers. The best way to understand those customers is to collect and analyze data about them. 

Curious about the types of questions included in market research surveys?

In brand strategy, market research is critical. Great research helps you determine what makes you stand out from competitors, and if those differences are what your ideal consumers value.

It’s critical to perform competitive intelligence work and to understand what your competitors are doing. This work can help you find ways your company can differentiate your brand from everything else. 

Understanding the market means having an awareness of what your competitors are doing so you stay on top of emerging trends. But it also means developing what makes your business unique and building that into your brand strategy.

Knowing your audience is just as important as knowing your market when it comes to creating an effective brand strategy. You need to understand their needs and what they expect from your brand to know how to cater to them. 

Consumer segmentation can help you understand your top buyer segments' demographic and behavioral traits. Market research is all about understanding exactly who your audience is, and how you can entice them emotionally to purchase your products and remain loyal. This is a major component of your brand strategy.

Your market research should include creating clear customer personas. These are short descriptions of your ideal buyer. Ideal buyers are the people who are perfect fits for your brand. They’ll feel strongly compelled to make an initial purchase and keep returning over and over again to your business. 

Customer personas help you understand and segment the kinds of people you’re trying to reach with your marketing. A deep understanding of your customers allows you to make the biggest possible impact.

Usage and attitudes research can give you insight into consumer preferences, habits, and purchase behaviors. 

You can build buyer personas by asking questions about:

Building clear buyer personas helps you understand how different audiences will interact with your brand. Are you reaching the best people for your products—those likely to become loyal, long-term customers and advocates? Or are you missing them and instead finding ones who are making only one purchase and then heading to a competitor?

Once you have your customer personas, it’s time to start talking to people who might fit into those categories to ensure your research and assumptions are accurate. 

This audience-focused part of the market research process can be undertaken using audience research tools, such as surveys. You can use them to analyze both your existing customers and the new ones you’d like to reach. 

Using surveys, you can check in with your customers to ensure that your buyer personas are accurate. You can also test aspects of your brand strategy to see if you’ve hit the mark there. Getting feedback directly from your customers and prospects is essential so you know you’re making decisions based on facts, not assumptions. 

Answering these questions is critical to your overall brand strategy because it will tell you how to build a brand that speaks to the people you want to reach. 

The purpose of a brand strategy isn’t to appeal to everyone - that’s just not possible. Still, your brand positioning should attract your target market in a clear and compelling way.

Once you’ve conducted your market research and talked to your customers, it’s time to determine and finetune your brand. 

One way to do so is to establish brand guidelines to ensure consistency across channels. Brand guidelines help you become recognizable to the market, your customers, and your own employees.

Brand guidelines allow your creative team to align on everything you put out into the world. They also help internal employees feel a sense of pride in the company culture—everyone loves branded merch! 

Here are some things to outline in your brand guidelines to help form your brand identity:

These are only a few of the potential questions to ask when creating your brand guidelines. The purpose of these guidelines is not to create overly rigid and inflexible rules, as your brand will evolve over time. 

If your company already has an established brand, then you can always iterate on it. Start with launching a brand tracking study to understand how your brand perception has changed over time.

It’s important to have every part of your brand strategy written down. This strategy will help make sure that everyone in your company is on the same page. Make these guidelines accessible to anyone in the company and vendors who need to follow them.

Related: Brand perception survey template

Once you’ve crafted your brand strategy, the real work begins. It’s time to get started with implementation.

Here are a few key considerations to ensure you implement your brand strategy smoothly.

One major factor of your brand strategy’s success is how consistent it is across every single channel you use to reach customers. If your website looks and sounds different than the materials you use in your physical store, your customers will have lower brand awareness. 

Consistency in branding doesn’t just mean ensuring your logo and color palette are the same everywhere. It also means avoiding discussions about things that don’t relate to your brand or business. Everything you add or discuss should align with your brand message. 

Cohesiveness and consistency build stronger brand recognition. Since that’s likely a goal of your brand strategy, you should take care to keep everything seamless.

Related: Brand awareness survey template

While it may seem like a contradiction to be both consistent and flexible, it’s possible! With the speed of change these days, sticking to a cohesive but outdated brand isn’t a wise choice.

Try to stay on top of trends and continue to conduct market research. This continuous discovery will help you ensure your brand is still relevant. 

If you find your old tactics aren’t working as well as they used to, don’t be afraid to make a change. Conducting market research and talking to customers will help you to ensure your brand stays relevant for years to come.

Customers aren’t the only ones who need to buy into your brand strategy. Your employees form a vital part of your brand strategy. After all, your employees are the ones who are communicating with customers on a daily basis. They should be well-versed in representing the brand. 

Instead, ensure you’re holding employees to your core values and educating them on the brand messaging and strategy.

Measuring the success of your brand strategy requires looking back at the goals in your plan. When you wrote your strategy plan, you should have created actionable and measurable goals—how did you decide you’d determine your success? 

Some common goals in brand strategies include:

There are multiple ways you could measure your brand success in addition to seeing if you achieved your pre-determined goals. Using several of these measures can give you a well-rounded picture of how successful your brand strategy is.

Measuring customer satisfaction allows you to check if your brand is delivering the value it promises. It will also give you an idea of how well your brand lives up to customer expectations.

If your brand is overpromising, or promising the wrong things, your brand strategy will be contributing to customer dissatisfaction. If that’s the case, it may be time for an update.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) helps you determine how satisfied customers are with an interaction, and how that interaction shapes their view of your brand. You can use this information to find customer pain points and improve them. 

Over time, this will help to increase the cohesion of your branding and your audience’s positive response to it.

Customer satisfaction is only one measure of brand success. Customer loyalty is also an important factor. 

You can use the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) survey to quickly understand how your customers feel about your business. Using just one question, you’ll be able to generate a numerical value that represents customer loyalty. 

By requesting further feedback from NPS survey respondents, you can find out more about what makes people loyal or unloyal to your brand. Loyal customers can help you identify the existing strengths of your brand and your company. Alternatively, unhappy customers will explain where your company went wrong, pointing you toward potential solutions.

You can even identify your happiest customers and encourage them to become outspoken brand advocates, spreading the word about your business and increasing your word-of-mouth marketing.

Measuring the success of your brand strategy isn’t a one-time exercise. You need to keep regularly checking with your analytics and your customers to ensure your branding is accurate, relevant, and compelling. 

Building a comprehensive brand strategy can help you take your brand to the next level. It is one of the key elements to creating a successful business. No matter where your brand currently stands, there’s always room for improvement and refinement. 

The most important step in creating a successful brand strategy is performing thorough market research. Use the SurveyMonkey brand awareness survey template to get started. 

NPS, Net Promoter & Net Promoter Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.