Another year has come and gone. You have worked diligently to ensure that all branding efforts were executed according to plan; a plan skillfully crafted with your internal cross-functional team and external partners. The primary goal- to help ensure that you are increasing brand recognition, awareness and value, connecting and engaging with all stakeholders through unique and memorable brand experiences and maintaining a competitive edge. As you look back on the year and what you have accomplished, you may be thinking that you can sit back, relax, maybe even pat yourself on the back and get ready to coast into the new year because you are confident that you have the arsenal of innovation required to meet, head-on, the opportunities and challenges that will undoubtedly face your brand in 2019.
Think again! When it comes to branding, there is no rest for the weary as the constant demands of your stakeholders, customers and competition, especially in the ever-changing world of technology, are bound to keep you up at night thinking about various offensive and defensive strategies that will continue to improve brand performance. As 2018 comes to a close and you embark on 2019, you should be looking forward and asking yourself:
- Is there anything I overlooked or could have done better or even differently? With a new year right around the corner, you have an entirely new set of 365 days where you can make adjustments that will enhance overall brand experience and optimize brand engagement. This should include evaluating the brand experience across all touchpoints—collateral, digital, website, mobile and app, branded environments, retail displays, trade show presence, digital and social media plans, content strategies, and employee engagement. You must take a holistic look at your brand to determine where you can make the most impact.
- Do you know with certainty what your internal and external stakeholders think about your brand? Do you have strategies in place that not only engage with your customers, but also with your employees? Are customers and employees embracing your brand? Do they believe in it? Your brand, and any brand for that matter, will only be successful if employees from the c-suite on down are embracing your brand the way it is intended.
Here are five questions you can ask yourself and use as a guide to understand where you should put the most focus on your brand over the next coming year.
1. Is your brand dressed for success?
Your brand’s overall look and feel greatly influences its ability to connect with your customers and employees. Is your corporate or brand identity as strong as it can be? Chances are, when it was initially designed it was developed for traditional media and communications outlets. Have you assessed your brand’s identity and visual platform within the digital space including the web, mobile and social media? Is it responsive in the digital world? Is your brand’s look and feel evolving with the times and keeping itself relevant with how your customers want to interact with your brand? How does your brand look and sound online as colors and messaging can be negatively impacted through online channels. Have you taken into consideration that Baby Boomers, who represent a large population, have become tech savvy and use laptops, tablets and smartphones to access information? How does your brand look when compared to its competitors? Does your brand still “own” a particular color, typestyle or icon or does it need to be evolved or is it even in need of a facelift (a nip and tuck here and there)? Visual appeal is critical to ensure that your brand stands out from the crowd, reinforces the desired experience, engages one-on-one with your audience and avoids getting lost in the sea of sameness.
2. Is your brand speaking with a consistent voice?
Your brand is at the center of the universe. Its strategic platform is the blueprint that defines your brand and how you do business, your internal culture and your overall visual and verbal communications’ strategy. Your brand also expresses itself across multiple touchpoints both internally and externally. Your brand’s core messaging must be consistent to reflect its overarching positioning and promise. With this said, your messaging must also be tailored to speak specifically to each stakeholder group–it comes down to dialing up/down the overarching positioning and promise based upon the needs of your audience. For example, how you speak to an investor might be different than how you speak to your employees, a vendor partner or the media. In order to build your brand’ reputation effectively, you must have a consistent voice, keeping true to your brand’s essence. While the intended audience may influence individual messages, the core of your brand positioning should ring true throughout everything you communicate.
3. Is your brand’s strategic platform defining its unique point of difference?
While you know who your competition is, when was the last time you conducted a thorough strategic analysis of not only your brand’s positioning, but also those of its peers? Competition is increasing across all industries and product categories with new “disruptor” brands wreaking havoc on direct and associated product categories and with mergers and acquisitions resulting in new powerhouse brands. You constantly need to be looking forward with one eye looking over your shoulder to ensure that your brand is maintaining its competitive edge. Where your brand may have once dominated a certain whitespace, you may find that you are no longer alone and that the competition is infringing upon your territory and causing confusion among your target audience, even giving your audience other viable options to consider. While your core promise might still apply, perhaps there is some aspect about your brand’s personality and/or positioning that need to be updated? A simple “gut check” on your brand platform may indicate the need to make adjustments. Sometimes minor enhancements to your brand platform and visual and verbal expression can result in significant increases in brand performance, especially in further differentiating your brand from the competition.
4. Are your employees, customers and investors fully engaged with your brand?
Once you’ve ensured your strategy is on target, your brand must be fully engaged with its customers in a way that is distinct, relevant, unique and memorable. It all starts with your employees. Your employees are your brand! The best of the best brand strategies will not reach true potential until your employees embrace your brand’s strategy and live the brand to the fullest. From the mailroom to the c-suite, from the new hire to the most-tenured employee, each person must be engaged with your brand from the inside/out, bottom/up and top/down. Do employees clearly understand the values of your brand and the reasons behind a rebrand or new brand? Take the time to engage them, train them and reward them because your new brand strategies may require them to do their same job, but do it differently.
5. Is your brand achieving its highest value?
Every brand has equity. It can be something tangible such as its actual financial worth and brand equity value, which is defined as the percentage of market capitalization directly attributable to the brand. Do you know how much of your brand actually contributes to corporate value and/or stock price? Brand equity can also mean something more emotional such as having a strong association to specific core values that are rooted in a trusted brand heritage (i.e. Johnson’s baby) or in customer service (i.e. Amazon, Apple, Jet Blue). Perhaps your brand is strongly associated with certain visual attributes such as color, typography and imagery (i.e. Coca-Cola, Tiffany, Harley Davidson). Are there specific strategies you should be employing to increase your brand’s financial and emotional equities?
In summary
As 2018 comes to a close and 2019 is loudly knocking on your door, you must constantly assess your brand’s performance on a multitude of levels and use the outcomes of your assessments to guide future brand building strategies. While we can’t guarantee better brand performance, the one thing we do know for certain is that the next 12 months will go faster than we expect. Wouldn’t it be nice to enter this next year answering each of these five questions with the confidence and assurance that you are deploying all the right strategies to help your brand grow?
