Your consumer needs and company advantages are at the core and your brand strategy, but you need something to tie everything together into a unified front. You may hear it referred to as your Brand Essence, or Big Idea. It’s the singular idea or concept that you want to come to life and run throughout everything you do to bring your brand strategy to life.
In this episode of the Real Food Brands Marketing Podcast, host and Food & Beverage Brand Strategist Katie Mleziva explains the importance of identifying the thread that runs through everything that you do and bridges the gap between your internal strategy and external activation.
What’s Your Big Idea?
“If the entire brand strategy serves as your north star, your big idea—or essence—is what it all boils down to in a few words that will inspire that action,” Katie says, “so it’s like the ray of light that really illuminates the path.” If you’ve ever wondered why some brands seem to soar while others stagnate, it’s because successful brands leverage this concept of a big idea that connects everything they do.
What’s important to understand is that this isn’t just getting people excited about a product. It’s the people…the benefits…the story that you are inviting people into. Figuring out what your big idea is helps you get clear on how to reflect that in everything you do.
How to Get to Your Big Idea
As one of the final deliverables in the Defining phase of your brand strategy work, you want to create this succinct statement of just a few words that reflects your vision, brand pillars, and positioning. It’s a fairly simple exercise, yet not easy! You want to know that your big idea is both relevant and ownable. Like any good experiment, you can hypothesize, test, learn, and optimize based on what you know and what you learn.
One of the most important things to take into account is customer insights—what people say about what draws them to your brand. And when you’ve got that big idea, the next challenge is how to align your organization and everything that you do around it. How does this change how you approach your brand story? Customer service? Packaging design and structure? How and where you choose to promote?
There’s a lot of big decisions to make, and Katie has developed a few tools to help you on your way. Don’t forget to visit realfoodbrands.com/strongbrand to get on the list for a free 5 day training the week of 2/1/21 to help set your brand apart.
Now, let’s go shake up shopping carts!
In This Episode:
- What to expect from the Real Food Brands podcast going forward.
- How identifying your Big Idea can impact brand growth.
- Why some brands soar and others falter, even with comparable products.
- Why your big idea is a thread that needs to run through everything that you do.
- The process you need to work through to get to your Big Idea.
- How you can get some help.
Quotes:
“If the entire brand strategy serves as your North Star, your Big Idea—or essence—is what it all boils down to in a few words that will inspire that action, so it’s like the ray of light that really lights the way. ” – Katie Mleziva
“Have you ever wondered why some brands seem to soar while others stagnate? They can have an equally good product, but one has something special.” – Katie Mleziva
“The Big Idea is the way you translate all of your strategy development into a succinct statement that reflects its vision, values, pillars, positioning, and more.” – Katie Mleziva
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