CEO’s involvement in Brand Strategy
CEO of the company should lead the brand strategy and must be passionate about the brand. He should buy the idea of branding and live it despite the daily and stressful routine with many duties at the same time. There should be continuous development and integration of the new strategies for which CEO must be backed by a strong board management team of senior contributors.
Customize your Branding Model
You can not use “one size – fit all” rule to your branding model. Brand success lies in its authenticity and uniqueness. You can research other similar brands from the same industry and tailor them to meet your needs and requirements.
Involve Stakeholders as well as Customers
A fair amount of marketing budget can be saved by obtaining valuable information for the brand strategy from your customers, employees and stakeholders. They are easily accessible and probably the best source of information to get a picture of current business landscape including the current brand image and brand positioning.
Advance the Corporate Vision
Internal efforts play a key role in making a corporate branding strategy successful. Corporate vision should be advanced throughout the company. Management should involve, educate and align everyone around the corporate objectives, values and future pathway.
Use Technology as a Tool
Technology helps spread the word in a fast and more effective way. Every corporate working environment must have a well designed and fully updated intranet. The company must have a website to make all information available to customers and clients round the clock. The looks of the website should reflect the professionalism of the company. A company website should be as comprehensive as possible with wealth of information about the brand.
Involve People in your Brand
Every person connected to the company interacts with significant number of people totally disconnected to the corporation. They serve as company’s most important brand ambassadors. The word of mouth is extremely valuable and has a great impact on the overall corporate image. The most effective way to turn employees into brand ambassadors is to train everyone adequately in the corporate brand strategy (vision, values and personality etc.) and making sure they fully understand and believe what exactly the corporation aims at being in the minds of its customers and stakeholders.
Offer what is Promised
The corporate brand is the face of the business strategy and basically it promises what all stakeholders should expect from the corporation. Every customer should be handled with outstanding care according to internal specifications and outside expectations.
Communicate to Audience
Bring the corporate brand to life through a range of well-planned, well-executed marketing activities, and make sure the overall messages are consistent, clear and relevant to the target audiences. Make sure the various messages are concise and easy to comprehend. Do not try to communicate every single point from the corporate branding strategy. Instead, a selective approach will make much more impact using the same resources.
Analyze the Brand Performance
Analyze the value that brand provides and how instrumental it is the brand in securing competitiveness? These are some of the questions that need to be answered and that the CEO should automatically seek as part of a commitment to run the strategy successfully. The brand equity consists of various individually tailor-made key performance indicators (including the financial brand value) and needs to be tracked regularly. A brand score card can help facilitating an overview of the brand equity and the progression as the strategy is implemented.
Evaluate and Evolve
The business landscape is changing almost every day in every industry. Hence the corporation needs to evaluate and possibly adjust the corporate branding strategy on a regular basis. Obviously, a corporate brand should stay relevant, differentiated and consistent throughout time, so it is a crucial balance. The basic parts of the corporate branding strategy like vision, identity, personality and values are not to be changed often as they are the fundamental components. Instead changes should be small and involve the thousands of daily actions and interpersonal behaviors, which the corporation employs as part of the brand marketing efforts. But make sure complacency does not take root in the organization and affect the goal setting.
Strong brands are those driven forward by owners who never get tired of raising their own bars. They become their own change agents – and brand champions for great brands.
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