5 Keys for a Solid Brand Strategy

Fit into the Buyer's life

To be successful a brand needs to comprehend how buyers thinks it and act to ensure that they're offerings fit seamlessly into their consumer's life and become available on top of mind.

“Instead of interrupting, work on attracting.”

— Dharmesh Shah, CTO and co-founder, HubSpot
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Make the Brand available

A Brand needs to become “top of mind” by focusing continuously on being available and promoting on our 📣Diffusion Channels. And be at the right place at the right time, seamlessly fitting to the life of the  buyers.

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Continuously reaching all buyers

By continuously reaching all buyers in the category but always maintaining constant communication distribution and avoiding getting silence, we build up the Brand Presence.

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Ensuring the brand is easy to buy

We ensure that the brand is easy to buy when the brand fits in the prospect's life. It needs to be convenient, accessible, ideally effortless. The customer also needs to knows where to find more information and products.

This come in pairs with the Brand's Distribution Channel, making products available to see and buy online and offline. Selling a protein snack bar? Find a way to make your product available in every shop that fits your strategy!
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Ensuring the brand is consistent

Consistency help to maintain a strong recognition and build familiarity with the Brand's identity. Keep advertise the same messages. Avoid making unnecessary changes that will confuse your customer and break the associations your prospect make about your Brand.
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To grow, spread the brand through Diffusion Channels

Through advertising promotion and communication, we ensure that the memory structures are reinforced and rebuild continuously over time. We keep the brand relevant and noticed especially among those who and where they are the most emotionally distracted.

Brand growth is achieved by increasing a Brand's popularity and visibility by reaching bigger networks effect at the right hubs even when Brands may appear similar at first glance.

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✍️ Next steps

• Is your Brand available? easy to buy? consistent?
• Are you continuously reaching Potential Buyers?
• Which Diffusion Channels would be appropriate for your Brand?
• What is your plan to continuously rebuild and reinforce your Brand in your Prospect's mind?

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Successful marketing lies in a brand’s ability to maintain distinctiveness and it’s salience:
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‍Distinction & Contrast

The brand elements need to contrast with their environment to stand out and create meaningful and helpful contrast between the Brands and others.
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Which one would you buy for your teenage kid?

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By distinguishing itself, a Brand can stand out and become memorable by being both relatable and different.

We achieve this by creating and using distinctive brand assets — the product design and pieces of communication, leveraging the sensory cues to stand out and remain top of mind.
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✍️ Next steps

• Does your Product and Brand Identity contrast with others? If so, how?
• How can you Brand be both relatable and different?

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Salience

sa·li·ence

/ˈsālyəns/

noun
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‍the quality of being particularly noticeable or important; prominence.

The Brand need to be noticeable to get attention. We first need to identify that salient feature, that signal to noise ratio, that peacocking feature that make the Brand relevant in the eyes of the buyers.

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We focus on the Brand salience by grabbing attention and priming the buyer’s mind, taking what is unique about the Brand and use it to his advantage.

The brand elements need to become familiar and stay in memory. By playing on over exaggerating what is distinctive and different, we talk to the buyer’s emotion in a way that talks to and excites and talk to the senses (sensorial) that stay in memory — building the memory structure of the brand in the buyer’s mind.

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✍️ Next steps

• Identify the salient element of your Brand, what makes it stand out
• What emotion stay in memory?

Creating relevant associations

We fit into the Buyer's life by offering him opportunities to make associations with their own thought process, making ita conscious choice to "pick" our Brand. Through their environment, we make the brand visible and available in a context where the brand is relevant.

Later, once a problem come to mind, our value proposition will boomerang into our Buyer's mind.

Strong, positive associations increase brand equity, leading to higher customer loyalty, willingness to pay premium prices, and advocacy.

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Functional Associations

Product Features, Benefits, and associations related to what the product or service The tangible or intangible benefits

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Emotional Associations

Brands can be associated with specific emotions, such as joy (Coca-Cola), adventure (Red Bull), or peace of mind (Allstate).
Identity: Brands can create associations with certain identities or lifestyles, like Harley-Davidson with freedom and rebellion.

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Symbolic Associations

Associating with symbols or icons that have a cultural, social, value or beliefs meanings and become iconic.

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Word Associations

By embedding a single, powerful word in consumers' minds, a brand can effectively "own" that word, creating a lasting and exclusive association that defines its identity.

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We create relevant associations by fitting the Brand solution, the Value Proposition with a promise of delivered value in the Buyer’s life.

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✍️ Next steps

• What are the types of Associations that could be relevant for your Brand?
• How does those Associations relate to your Value Proposition?

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Reinforcing Associations:

Consistency

Regularly reinforcing brand associations across all touchpoints solidifies associations in consumers' minds.

Repetition

Strengthens the association connections by injecting Brand Advertising Assets in the Diffusion Channel

Innovation

Keep the brand relevant with new content aligning with existing associations while reinforcing its core messages

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Priming Thoughts & Experiences that people connect with a brand

Priming a brand in consumers' minds begins with the everyday experiences and moments that shape their lives. Brands can seamlessly fits into their Buyer's routine, thoughts, daily necessities, associating emotions that make the brand more memorable, desirable or even necessary.

These interactions build the mental connections that will fire again once the brand become thought of or available once again.

Environmental cues, conversations, word-of-mouth, and repeated exposure through various diffusion channels further strengthen these associations, making them more enduring over time.

In today’s digital world, social media and online platforms amplify these effects, enabling brands to shape perceptions across a wide audience. When executed effectively, this process ensures that needs and desires of the Buyer are instinctively linked to the brand, leaving a lasting impact on consumer decisions.
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✍️ Next steps

• How do you prime your Brand into the thoughts & experiences of your prospect?

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Easily Recognizable & Familiar

To succeed to be top of mind we need the buyers to feel familiar with the brand.

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A successful brand is Familiar and easy to recognize over time making people feel connected. It’s through repeated availability and creating and reinforcing associations that the brand become Familiar.
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Popularity & Visibility

The more impressions the brand get from the Audience, the more they will be subject by the brand presence, the more the potential for growth if your brand is distinct and relevant enough.

The more branding a product has the lower the cost to acquire new customers.

Brands need to fiercely compete to dominate their buyer's minds. Value propositions all race toward influencing the final Buyer's choice. Associations are shaping perceptions and guiding decisions. The brand that best aligns these factors wins the buyer’s preference, becoming the natural choice.

“The top of mind wins every time.”

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Building Trust for Sales

By reliably providing and delivering consistent value and most importantly, delivering on the Promise, a brand increase its potential for buyers to come again. When the trust is broken the buyer may be lost.

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✍️ Next steps

• Is your brand easily recognizable?
• What is your long term plan to make your Brand Iconic and Familiar?
• How is your Brand doing in terms of Visibility?

What are Memory Structures

Memory structures are the broader mental frameworks that organize and store Brand Associations in the consumer’s mind. They are the "Messages" of the Brand, sent to our audience, they act as a network or web of connections that help consumers retrieve these associations when they encounter a brand or a related situation. Memory structures influence how easily a brand comes to mind and how it is perceived in comparison to competitors.

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Creating Memory Structures

A brand's success relies on creating and consistently reinforcing relevant associations that build and refresh the memory structures that consumers use to remember and choose brands.

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➊ Availability → Creates ➋ Recognition

‍➋ Recognition → Brings ➌ Familiarity

‍➌ Familiarity → Refreshes ➊ Availability

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Reinforcing and Rebuilding Memory Structures

Now that we created those Memory Structure by forging associations, now we want to reinforce and rebuild those memory structures associated with the brand or product over time to appear in our buyer's mind before our competitors do.

Reinforcing those existing associations makes the brand easy to buy and noticed.

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➊ Availability → Creates ➋ Recognition

‍➋ Recognition → Brings ➌ Familiarity

‍➌ Familiarity → Creates ➍ Trust

➍ Trust → Increase potential ➎ Sales

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And we closed the loop of our first buy. Once Buyers recognize, are familiar and trust the Brand, we can go directly from Availability to Sales. And our Job as Brand Marketer is done ✅.

Now the real job is to deliver constantly and consistently refresh those Memories Structures, with our Brand Assets availability and through our Diffusion Channels.

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✍️ Next steps

• Identify each steps and see where your Brand Assets serves or break your feedback loop

Our goal is to create long lasting Impressions. We want to deepen the emotional connection and create a peak experience that make the brand or product more meaningful and memorable.

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