Essentials of Brand Strategy

The Three Keys to an empathy-driven Brand Strategy

While some people think of brand strategy as a nice-to-have - for us it’s essential. Brand strategy is your intention for influencing your customer’s perception of your business. It's how you define your target audience, what makes your service or product unique, and who you want to be in the world. It's basically the story that you tell about yourself and your business, from beginning to end. As such, brand strategy really isn't something that should be thrown together at the last minute—it requires time, collaboration and research before you start creating content, messaging or marketing materials for specific audiences. But once you have this down, it will be easy to create new marketing campaigns in no time at all.

Empathy-Driven Brand Strategy

The definition of empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. I believe that empathy in brand strategy and design is what makes or breaks its effectiveness.

Empathy-driven brand strategy is a powerful approach to building brand loyalty. With a focus on understanding and sharing the innate fears, desires, needs, and motivations of your clients/customers, you can more easily create relevant messaging that intuitively connects with them. It’s about meeting your clients where they are - emotionally.

The first step in empathy-driven strategy is to truly understand the people whom your brand serves. You should have a deep understanding of their journey(s) with the company, service, or product, how they interact with it, what they need from it and how they feel about it—all while taking into account the typical demographic and psychographic factors.

Here are our top three keys to empathy-driven brand strategy:

Key #1: The Why

Before you turn your attention outward, you have to have a clear understanding of your internal environment - your purpose. As someone once told me, you can’t execute on the outside if you’re not aligned on the inside.

There’s a reason Simon Sinek literally wrote an entire book called “Start With Why”. Your why is your purpose. It's the reason you exist - beyond making money. It’s why you’ve chosen to dedicate so much of your time and energy to your craft. It's not just a tagline or mission statement, it's the 30,000 ft view of your existence.

Once you do the soul searching necessary to identify your purpose, you can create the rest of your brand’s foundation from there, like your vision for the future, your promise to your clients, and your core values.

Key #2: The Audience

The second (and I would argue most important) key to a successful brand strategy is understanding your audience. This is where the empathy comes into play.

It's important not only to know who and where they are, but also to understand how they think and feel about you, what they want from your brand, and why they choose to interact with you. It's also crucial to consider their pain points—what it is that makes them frustrated with similar products or services.

At V&Co, we use a few specific tools to help us gain a deep understanding of your audience, like empathy mapping and customer journeys. These help us to go beyond the typical demographics and psychographics, and really hone in on their mindset so that we can draw the line between where they are now and why they would want to work with you.

Key #3: The Position

The third critical piece of the brand strategy essentials formula is your position. This is the piece that I feel like many brand designers miss. A position statement is a sentence or two that describes your company's unique value proposition to customers. It should be actionable, memorable and clear and explain why you’re different from the other options.

You can begin by researching your competitors or peer companies, identifying how they express their strengths, and making a list of all the things that make you different from them. Next, ask yourself how you want to present your brand to the world considering these alternatives and what makes you special—what do you do better than they do?

By focusing on these three areas, you'll have the basics of an effective brand strategy.

If you’re looking to create a brand strategy for your company, there are three key areas that you need to focus on. First, identify the “why?” behind what makes your business unique and compelling. Then, understand your audience and what they want. Finally, craft a position statement that clearly communicates your difference in a way that resonates with customers.

If you’re looking to go more in-depth, we can help. Get in touch to schedule your discovery call.