In the vast sea of competitors, you have to position your company either on a strong brand or innovation, which means means storytelling and efficient brand positioning, or a team that can base new features on actual user problems.

For most companies an easier entry point is to become a leader in the pack and to stand out with a world class brand strategy. You have to go all-in on brand positioning and you need to be consistent, memorable, and distinct, all while doing this creatively to drive future business growth. The quality of a brand is measured at a high level with attributes like: culture, values, reflection, personality, archetypes, promise, reward, benefit, reasons to believe, advantages, discriminators, and differentiators.

However, there are also attributes about the space that your brand operates in, such as category, competition, source of business, target groups, relevance, and insights.

Moving into modern brand positioning is really about customer-centric messaging and then making that actionable. But how do you make branding actionable while ensuring brand consistency? It’s all about your brand activations.

Beyond brand strategy: Brand position and building a strong brand identity

Today, most businesses cannot count on being the only organization offering a particular service or product. Chances are good that your niche is heavy with competitors. The challenge is making your offerings stand out from others. You can add multiple features, but what comes next?

For instance, if your product or service platform is already maxed in features? What do you do? Cram more features in does you no good, so how do you make yourself stand out in an ever-more competitive market?

How to diagnose the problem and fix it

Your digital brand strategy is a long-term plan that documents specific principles to help keep your brand consistent, memorable, and distinct with time which keeps you at top of mind with your audience. It can also help align employees to the core beliefs and aims of the brand – something I had noticed the power of positioning during my time while working with and consulting, on a campaign.

Leadership team should own the brand strategy workshop

Branding is not a superficial exercise in making things “look pretty”. Great branding means customer acquisition performance, hitting sales goals, and scaling revenue streams. Modern branding is about architecting success through both storytelling and engineering to achieve a strong brand experience while meeting fiduciary goals.

“Modern branding is about architecting success through both storytelling and engineering.”

Here’s the key: the brand story should always come first. The first step in comprehensive brand strategy development is to define who you want to be and what you’re trying to say. Engineering should follow that organizational direction as it’s way easier than trying to take the bigger, emotional factors and retrofit that onto what was already engineered.

This is how website initiatives easily steal a year of your life away.

The importance of Strategic Branding

Managing a brand is hard work, and it’s more challenging when you’re in an oversaturated market where every brand looks the same. Your customers group products and services from the same industry together when comparing which product / service has a competitive advantage. Customers perceive selling power, brand value, and customer loyalty to determine which is the best choice in a sea of options. With strategic branding, you future-proof your brand and develop it in a way that differentiates you from others.

One of the crucial steps to growing in an oversaturated market is highlighting what makes your brand unique — which is what strategic branding is all about.

So, at the end of the day, brand strategy boils down to one thing: storytelling. Your brand’s strategy is its story, its vision, its heart, and soul.