Selecting just one branding strategy may not be enough to make a dramatic impact on the success of your business but combining these 9 key strategies helps to transform your company into a potential profit machine and create an effective, differentiated corporate brand.
You Need A Well-Rounded Corporate Branding Strategy
Designing a new logo with a few of your favorite colors isn’t enough to call your branding strategy “a wrap.” Extensive investigation and a complete understanding of your target market is the first step to creating a hard-hitting corporate brand.
Combine that with the innovative and expert development of a corporate voice, winning designs, and a solid story – and you’ve begun a corporate brand strategy.
What Is A Corporate Branding Strategy?
Before diving into defining corporate branding strategies, it’s imperative to first understand what corporate branding is and what types of companies can benefit from one.
Corporate Brand
Corporate branding is developing a combination of visual representations, copy that invokes action, and a voice that speaks to a company’s target market.
Effective branding is accomplished through ample research, a deep commercial understanding, brainstorming using collected data, development and essential iterations, and a powerful launch.
Corporate branding encompasses how you introduce your company to the world and those employees who work to make your business a success. It’s the story told by your corporation blanketed in the actions your firm uses to solve the problems of its target market – and with which mission-aligning guiding principles.
Corporate Branding Strategy
This leaves many corporate CMOs wondering – What is a corporate branding strategy?
An expert company branding strategy connects every part of a brand with every part of marketing efforts – like the spokes that connect the center of an old bicycle wheel to its rim.
Some of those branding spokes include things like your company’s vision, mission, values, the promise you make to your customers, and the image you’d like your company to publicly portray.
Commonly, a corporate branding strategy is an overarching tactic used to connect the company and any subsidiaries under the corporate umbrella. Take Google, for example.
The major conglomerate operates the Google Playstore, Google Voice, YouTube, ReCaptcha, Google Translate and many others.
Each of those companies could operate well individually – and they do, but a corporate brand strategy connects them all. The company certainly has evolved since 1998 – and that goes for their branding, too.
9 Crucial Company Branding Strategy Elements
A profit-creating corporate brand strategy is crafted by an expert team with a high level of creativity and a knack for the implementation of gathered information in a way that transcends all platforms.
There are 9 crucial corporate branding strategy elements that every firm demands. Let’s dive in by separating them into three distinct categories – Brand Core, Brand Positioning, and Brand Personality.
Brand Core
1. Purpose
Young adults tend to agonize over their purpose in life as they step out on their own and many company owners suffer from the same concern. A corporate purpose shouts how your company and its products and services do their part to make the world a better place.
Howard Schultz’s global coffee company, Starbucks, created a powerful brand that included its purpose. Schultz’s climb out of childhood poverty motivated his company’s drive to fight global hunger with its profit and social responsibility focus.
2. Mission
A company’s mission states in a concise manner, what its purpose is and is used to put investors’ minds at ease and rally employees and clients to get on board with their corporate responsibility initiatives driven by that mission statement. It includes the “who,” “what,” and “why” behind the company’s objectives.
The infamous TED organization’s mission statement is direct and powerful. It’s simple, “Spread ideas.” Broadcasting speakers willing to share their knowledge to the world cost-free, TED lives its mission.
3. Vision
A vision statement as part of a corporate branding strategy aims to allow clients, stockholders, and its employees to visualize a better world because of the company’s work. The vision’s intention is to create inspiration and an emotional connection.
While a company’s mission and vision seem similar, the mission encompasses the goals of the company while the vision statement describes its hopes and dreams for the future.
Brand Positioning
4. Audience
A corporate audience is one element at the heart of an effective branding strategy. They are a group of humans most likely to become clients based on their demographic and psychographic information.
When an organization’s target audience is other companies, they will collect firmographics. Collecting data about your target market helps to shape many facets of a great strategy.
5. Market
Many think of wooden stands with a variety of produce when they think of the word, “market” but in an expert branding strategy, a market is the entire group of people who can be considered customers and those who carry the status of “leads.” It can also be considered the demand for a company’s products and services.
The market is commonly the target of advertisers and marketers when selling products and services but when branding, it’s imperative to understand the ebbs and flows, preferences, and historical tendencies so the brand may evolve with the ever-changing market.
6. Goals
What does your company want to achieve? What’s the end goal? These objectives are a massive part of a solid corporate branding strategy and when these goals align with the extensive target audience/market research – there’s a higher likelihood that success ensues.
Examples of corporate goals that an effective branding strategy works toward include increasing brand awareness, retention of existing customers, and differentiating your specific offering, product, or service.
Brand Personality
7. Promise
Include an authentic promise in your branding strategy. Just like a person, a company is only as good as its word and when a firm makes promises to its consumers and employees, the intention should be to keep them. Shipping company, FedEx, makes a guarantee on their shipping speed. Packages reach their destination on time.
8. Voice
The company’s voice shapes its messaging including in a corporate brand strategy and offers everything from an upbeat, positive feel to a voice that’s more clear and concise.
For example, Coca-Cola’s brand voice always demonstrates feel-good, family-friendly copy and imagery to give their customers a sense of togetherness while enjoying an ice-cold cola beverage.
9. Tagline
A great tagline captures the attention of your target market and simultaneously informs them of your offer, but your competitors may not. Their intent is to be instantly identifiable and connect the entire brand with the company. Nike’s slogan is known worldwide and motivates action with its fitness gear and apparel. “Just do it.”
How To Implement A Successful Corporate Branding Strategy
When developing a winning corporate branding strategy, take your time. A rushed strategy is not a complete one and when marketing leaders cut corners, the result is often far from the original intent – and with a depleted branding budget.
As intricate and involved as developing a corporate branding strategy is, it may not be the task for the already-busy CEO or marketing team.
A creative branding agency employs experts well-versed in essential research and has a portfolio of unique completed projects by an award-winning branding agency with proven results.
These skilled designers are tasked with completing highly-creative brands, combining all of the key elements, and delivering your future success on time and on budget.
