Optimize Your Brand Story Using These Brand Strategy Principles

On February 5th, Katie is launching her new Brand Strategy Streamlined program, which provides content, coaching, and collaboration to define, align, and activate your brand strategy. It’s a combination of on-demand content you can move through at your own pace and live coaching and guidance to help you along the way.

One of the key outcomes of a successful brand strategy is a clear brand story statement: a paragraph you can use as the springboard for how you weave your story through everything that you do.

In this episode of the Real Food Brands Marketing Podcast, host and Food & Beverage Brand Strategist Katie Mleziva takes you through the Brand Strategy Streamlined process for developing a brand story that is clear, relevant, and differentiating.

A Quick Refresher on Brand Strategy

Your brand strategy is built around the 3 C’s: Competitors, Consumers, and your Company. If you picture a Venn diagram, your brand should be where your consumers and your company overlap, leaving out your competitors. The question you always want to ask yourself is simple: how can I meet my consumers’ needs in a way that my competitors either can’t or won’t?

3 Steps to Your Brand Story

To write your Brand Story in an organized way, Katie’s developed a three-step process:

Get a lay of the land with what your competitors are saying to see what’s out there already and where there might be an opportunity to say something different.
Look at your consumers to understand what their pain points are and what brings them joy so you know you’re meeting their needs and speaking their language.
Look at your Company vision, competitive advantages, pillars, positioning, personality, key messages, and big idea to help guide how you’re going to bring your brand to life.

Throughout the process, write down phrases and messages that keep coming up so you can document them in a “parking lot” document to use as supporting messages anywhere you’re writing copy.

Listen to the full episode for examples of how to put your brand story into action. If you’re going to DIY, Katie recommends you go back and listen to Episode 55 with Anna Bradshaw, the Brand Strategy series parts 1, 2, and 3, and Episode 68, “Turn Your Marketing Plan into a Consumer Connection Plan.” And of course, you can sign up for the Brand Strategy Streamlined program to get a helping hand.

Now, let’s go shake up shopping carts!

In This Episode:

Why developing a brand story is so important.
How your brand story emerges from your brand strategy.
Why your story is not just about you or your brand, and what it needs to include.
How the Brand Strategy Streamlined program can help you get started.
Previous episodes of the Real Food Brands podcast about developing a brand strategy and brand story.
Why it’s so important to go through the entire process to write the best version of your brand story.
What’s in a Brand Story Statement and how you can use it.
Examples of putting your brand story into action.

Quotes:

“You might want to skip the process and just get something down, but hopefully your business has a long life in front of it, and in the scheme of things strategy doesn’t have to come at the expense of action—the process always uncovers insights that improve the outcome.” – Katie Mleziva

“We use proven brand strategy concepts that big companies and big agencies use, but I’ve taken out the extra complexity and added in my favorite frameworks and exercises that help to really get to the core insights for your brand with actionable outcomes.” – Katie Mleziva

“When you think of your work as helping other people achieve their goals versus purely selling a product, it takes on a whole new level of motivation.” – Katie Mleziva

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