Brand strategy and marketing can be really confusing for a lot of people. There are a lot of options out there, and in order to make the right decisions, you need to lay a strategic foundation for your brand.
Today on the Real Food Brands Podcast, host and Brand Strategist Katie Mleziva talks through her 3-step framework for developing and implementing a brand strategy to make sure that everything you do helps you achieve your business vision and objectives.
Brand Strategy Is the “North Star”
Having a brand strategy that is documented and communicated to your team makes it every decision so much easier. Katie works with many companies that don’t yet have one in place. If you’re in the startup phase looking to scale quickly, or you’re scaling and have hit a plateau, it might be time to reexamine your brand strategy. In working with these companies, Katie has developed a 3-step framework to help you get started. With these exercises, it really helps to put pen to paper so you can get yourself in the right frame of mind.
1. Define
Draw a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles: competitive landscape, your company’s unique offer, and consumer’s needs. In the middle is where the magic happens—where you meet your consumer’s needs in a way that your competitors can’t or won’t.
- Competitive landscape: In the food industry, you need to be able to identify gaps in the market space. If you don’t know about your category, you won’t sound like you know what you’re talking about when you have a conversation with a buyer. Write down your top five to ten competitors and what key messages you see when you visit their website, look at their packages, and check out their social media.
- Your company’s unique offer: Think about this as what is your company’s unfair advantage? Look at what knowledge you and your team has that sets you apart. Do you have a special process? Access to new information? This is where you can start talking about your brand pillars, your positioning, and your brand personality.
- Consumer’s needs: It used to be that people would just look at demographics. These days, we’ve expanded the lens to include psychographic factors in order to build out a customer persona that really brings your target market to life. Write down some of things that may define your core consumer, including their habits and behavior. What do they do on a day to day basis? What do they currently use instead of your product?
2. Align
Once you have your brand strategy documented, you need to share it with everyone on your team, external and internal. People from all different areas of your business can have really great ideas about how to market and build your business, and giving them a glimpse of your vision and how you’re going to get there can be really motivating. Working from the same playbook helps you consistently deliver on your point of difference.
To help you figure out how to align, Katie has created a brand checkup scorecard to do a self-assessment. Even if you don’t fill it out, going through the questions will help you understand how your brand strategy impacts different areas of your business.
3. Activate
A lot of people like to jump to this step right off the bat. That makes sense because it’s the tactical part of things, but if you jump straight to website copy or package design or distribution, how will you know if you’re reaching the right people and saying the right things?
For starters, you need to think about how you can have an integrated marketing strategy. You can test all sort of different tactics, but they need to work together in some way. For starters, outline your overall business objective: a revenue goal, a profit goal, a distribution goal, launching a new product, etc. Everything in your plan should be getting you closer to your business objective.
From there, take your ideal audience and identify the hurdle. What’s the belief or behavior that we need to change among our ideal consumers in order to get them to purchase our product? Most people say “awareness,” but the truth is that’s too easy because most brands could use more awareness. So thinking beyond that, is it cost? Is it unfamiliar ingredients? Is there a trusted player in the market you need to get them to switch from? That lets you identify strategies to attack those hurdles.
Finally, it’s time to identify tactics. You need to make sure that every email, every social post, every partnership, everything that you do is going to get you closer to your business objective. Katie recommends a “one room test” where you bring all of your marketing materials, displays, website, packaging and more together to see if it really works together the way that it should.
Please join us by listening to the podcast for more in-depth information on using this framework to define, align and activate your brand strategy…and don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode.
Now, let’s go shake up shopping carts!
In This Episode:
- Why a brand strategy is essential for your business’ success.
- The 3-step framework Katie uses when she works with natural food and beverage businesses to develop a brand strategy.
- How to identify where you meet your ideal consumer’s needs in a way your competitors can’t or won’t.
- Why it’s so important to understand the competitive landscape in your category.
- How to think about your brand’s unique offer.
- The evolving ways that we think about ideal consumers.
- How to align your team around your brand strategy.
- Katie’s tips and tricks to activate your brand strategy.
- The “one room test” you can do to look at whether or not all of your marketing is working together.
Quotes:
“You can think of brand strategy as the North Star for every decision you make in your business to align the front end and the back end.” – @RealFoodBrands
“It makes it a lot harder to tell a compelling story and connect with consumers if you don’t know who they are, how to describe your unique benefit or offer in a way that they find relevant, and if you don’t know what your competitors are saying.” – @RealFoodBrands
“ When people can’t follow easily along and see a consistent story and where you’re going, they start to go somewhere where they can see that.” – @RealFoodBrands
“If you jump right to writing website copy, or package design, or your distribution strategy, how will you know that you’re reaching the right people and saying the right things?” – @RealFoodBrands
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