What is Driving Your Brand Strategy?
When was the last time you hopped in your car, truck or SUV and drove aimlessly?
Without purpose or final destination.
Once you’ve motored beyond city limits, you make an impulsive left turn, followed by a random right and another unplanned left. You have no clue of where you are headed. You are driving without a terminus. No GPS to follow.
You spend weeks and months cruising along deserted country roads with no inkling of where you will end up. No idea if there are places where you can pull over for gas, a bite to eat and a bathroom break.
This feeling of being continually ‘lost’ is what it feels like to drive your business without a brand strategy.
Failure to carefully plan and develop your overarching brand strategy, you lead you to experience any or all of the following:
You play marketing roulette and hope the latest shiny social media bullet finally makes the gun go off. This week it’s the red number on that Facebook ad. Next week we’ll bet on black with that LinkedIn article. You try a little of this and a little of that without any long-term plan. You approach marketing like an intoxicated, twitchy gambler in Vegas where the house always wins.
You work hard and consistently invest in marketing but, make no forward progress. You become a modern-day Sisyphus, pushing massive rocks up steep hills only to see them roll back to where you started. This is what happens in the absence of a solid strategy that connects and supports all of your tactical marketing efforts.
You feel cheated by all the marketers you have ever worked with who promised great results and failed to deliver. Feeling embittered, you vow never to explore any new approaches that might jumpstart your brand-building efforts. One-bitten, twice-shy skepticism dictated by past events prevents you from seizing opportunities to re-shape the future of your enterprise.
Similar to an automobile, a business has to be driving in the right direction to achieve maximum results. To arrive at different answers and accelerate your marketing efforts, it begins with asking entirely new and different questions:
Does Our Brand Voice Blend In or Stand Apart from All Others?
Is Our Brand Strategy Connected to a Compelling Story?
Do We Clearly Understand the Values That Drive that Story?
Without a distinctive brand story that only you can tell, it’s impossible to establish a firm position in the mental real estate of the market you are trying to compete in. A clearly defined and articulated brand helps distinguish you from all other players in your space. Makes you more recognizable and top-of-mind to customers. Also offers an expansive, wide-open freeway for all of your tactical marketing efforts to follow. It becomes the rallying point that creates internal cohesion for your team, helping everyone stay focused on delivering a consistent brand message driving towards the same objective. In the same direction.
Without a brand strategy, you tend to put the proverbial cart before the horse and focus time and attention on media platforms like TikTok, Instagram posts, Facebook ads or colourful company swag.
Is it time to re-think your entire approach to brand strategy? Time to end the spray-and-pray and slam on the brakes before making time-wasting decisions and spending money on tactical implementation like Facebook ads, TikTok videos, blogging, tweeting or podcasting?
Only you know if you are making optimum use of your limited resources and if your marketing is gaining any traction. Until you are crystal clear on your brand strategy, what that looks like and where your story can take your business, any road will do.
Just like those days when you are driving aimlessly.
“The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status, or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we all believe that we are above-average drivers.” -
DAVE BARRY
p.s… If you are wondering how high-level strategy connects to ground-zero tactics, consider first the difference between Brand Marketing and Direct Marketing. To begin with the objectives are totally and wildly different. With short-term Direct Marketing, the goal is to drive traffic and immediate sales. With long-term Brand Marketing you are trying to build a community and become the top-of-mind provider people think of and choose. Months or years before they walk in and buy.
It's important to know that you don’t need to be an iconic brand like Disney, Ferrari or a legend like Johnny Cash to create an identity that becomes your industry equivalent of “The Man in the Black”. Based in Chicago, David Rubenstein is a business leader who clearly took the time to think through his brand strategy, what makes him different and how that can be communicated through a story based on his values.
Brand Marketing is a discipline that demands a courageous triple combination of Consistency, Patience and Faith. A commitment to play a much longer game. Since June of 2019, this is exactly what Tim Beach and his team at Calgary’s Charlesglen Toyota have been demonstrating once they became known throughout the province as “Alberta’s Celebration Destination” Each day, Tim, Ashley and the crew share stories of celebration – often with thematically aligned cakes and cupcakes – to brighten social media feeds and creates miles of smiles all over the internet.
YOUR BRAND. WIDE-OPEN.
Throughout the course of the pandemic, we have made every effort to serve small to medium-size business owners with an open heart and no strings attached. That's why we allot a certain amount of time each month for readers like you to schedule a 20-Minute Discovery Session via ZOOM. If you are facing a business or branding challenge that you are not quite sure how to handle and need to bounce ideas and gain clarity, we’re only a click away.
If you're feeling now is the opportune time to re-position, and differentiate your company or organization, you might want to explore a metaphorical road trip called THE BRANDING HIGHWAY. Our in-person and virtual Executive Bootcamps serve as both journey and destination to help your brand emerge as an undeniable, undisputed, "Category of One". Impossible to describe, this unpredictable journey is best understood when you take a quick peek at this Video Overview:
“The most important victory is the one which has to arrive” ENZO FERRARI
IF YOU ARE PLANNING A VIRTUAL OR LIVE SPEAKING EVENT:
The wheels of business turn faster each quarter and your company or industry association may be anxious to stay ahead of the lighting-fast relevance curve. In that respect, we are scheduling many in-person and virtual programs for 2021 with customized content designed to inspire conference attendees to acquire a “STADIUM-SIZED PERSPECTIVE”.
For more information on scheduling an In-Person or Virtual Speaking Program, send us a note here: bookings@gairmaxwell.com
Every week someone asks a question about our videos and more specifically our media partner responsible for the storyboarding, production and editing. Headquartered in the shadows of the CN Tower in Toronto, Ontario, Defiant Astronaut Media is uniquely positioned to help business leaders re-think what's possible with this art form and how it can help build your brand. If you are curious about what's involved to get the proper gear to support your own video publishing efforts, here is a few ideas to get started. Click here: https://kit.co/defiantastronaut
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“If you choose not to decide you have still made a choice” NEIL PEART