Point blank, no brand thrives in the market without an effective brand strategy. Successful CPG brands on shelves today invested time and effort into creating an organized brand strategy. Consumer goods companies that have expanded their market share over time have incorporated strategic brand development into their design process. Therefore, brand development isn’t an option; it’s a crucial element that determines the success or failure of your entire brand strategy.
What, then, is brand development?
Brand development is an aspect of brand strategy and includes a thorough process of building and solidifying your brand’s value. Brand Development goes beyond creating a logo or packaging design; it’s the holistic approach where you systematically create a consistent brand experience that appeals to your current customers and target audience.
Smart companies invest heavily in brand development because it allows them to stand out among their competitors. In a marketplace where shelves overwhelm customers with options, brand development becomes a paramount feature to implement, often bringing your brand forward as it sits among a sea of competitors.
A meticulous and well-structured brand development strategy sets the stage for fostering brand loyalty. You can guarantee long-term success with a formidable brand development strategy.
No two brands have the same ideology. Each brand will have a different strategy for brand development depending on its values, brand story, and point of differentiation. Companies adopt two types of brand development strategies: standard and strategic brand development.
This article is for the business owner, brand manager, and marketing director looking for the best brand development process for their company. We will also look at the intricacies of implementing standard and strategic brand development and how to incorporate them into your brand strategy.
A Look At The Standard Brand Development Practices
CPG brands operating standard brand development as part of its brand strategy will look to establish an identity and promote it to a particular audience. Standard brand development entails creating a distinct logo and visual identity that resonates with the brand’s messaging. Brands that adopt Standard Brand development as part of their strategy will follow these practices:
Logo and Visual Identity
A standard brand development process focuses on creating an appealing logo and visual identity. The goal is to ensure that current and prospective clients can easily differentiate your brand. Plus, the logo and visual identity always match the brand’s value. Unfortunately, focusing solely on creating a logo and visual identity could make brands miss other intricate aspects of brand development.
Marketing and Advertising
Standard brand development uses conventional marketing to achieve results. The advertising methods are usually for immediate sales rather than long-term branding.
Product Quality
Ensuring an impeccable product quality is essential in brand management. Standard product brand development focuses on showcasing the quality of your product to your current and prospective customers. However, relying on product quality alone could mean neglecting psychological and emotional aspects that determine brand perception.
Customer Engagement
Engaging with your audience is crucial to brand awareness and the standard brand development strategy. For companies adopting typical brand development practices for their brand strategy, customer engagement is one of their priorities in ensuring success. With Standard Brand development, customer interaction sometimes becomes transactional and may focus on getting a sale rather than building a community.
Strategic Brand Development
Strategic brand development is more in-depth and comprehensive than the former. The strategy is to delay brand identity development, first focusing on identifying distinct positioning and gaps in the product category. Strategic brand development means your company focuses on creating a unique and consistent brand experience across all touchpoints.
Companies adopting Strategic Brand development prioritize building a strong brand that will remain relevant for generations. They go beyond just making a sale to establish brand loyalty and improve customer experience.
PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Nestle are prime examples of brands adopting strategic brand development. As a result of investing heavily in consumer understanding, product positioning, and competitive gaps, they have increased their market share while ensuring customer loyalty worldwide.
Strategic brand development is connecting brand value with customer pain points. That means that you create strategies that highlight your brand objectives but ultimately solve the problems of your current and prospective customers.
How To Engage In Strategic Brand Development
In this competitive and dynamic business environment we find ourselves in, the only way for your target audience to differentiate you is by incorporating a strategic approach to brand development. Strategic Brand Development is a holistic point of view in establishing brand value that appeals to your target audience across all business borders. A strategic brand development strategy is what differentiates a brand from another and helps to foster brand loyalty.
As a founder and a business owner, here are four aspects of strategic brand development you should understand to help you succeed in any marketplace:
Market Research
A strong brand will begin its strategic brand development strategy with a deep dive into the market. You have to conduct thorough research to gain a peak understanding of what your target audience needs are, the market trends, and what your competition is doing.
Strong Brand Identity
The next phase in engaging in strategic brand development is creating a solid brand identity. Now that you understand what obtains in the market, you can develop an identity that matches your research. Your company’s values, personality, mission, brand story, and Unique Selling proposition all make up a strong brand identity. These elements have to align with the market trends.
Creating a solid brand identity is crucial to an effective strategic brand development strategy. Understand your core values and discover how to incorporate them into your story. Then, provide your target audience with products to help them resonate more with your brand story.
Consistent Brand Experience
As a business owner, one of your goals is always to enhance customer experience. Strategic Brand Development is more or less like a marathon and not a sprint. You want to give your target audience products that appeal to their values to gain loyalty. As much as the leading consumer goods companies want to make sales, they want to continue to increase brand loyalty and trust.
One way you can do this is by providing consistent brand experience. You are making products that will heighten the experience of anyone who tries them. So, whether in the packaging or social media presence, ensure you do not compromise customer experience. A strategic brand development strategy is successful when you can maintain a consistent brand experience across all business touchpoints.
Measurement and Evaluation
Top CPG brands always measure and evaluate their brand metrics to stay relevant. Your brand metrics include sales figures, brand awareness, and customer engagement. You should assess anything that gives you insight into how effective your brand development strategy is.
Refine Brand Strategy
Customer preferences change, and so too do market trends. As such, you should constantly refine your brand development strategy to align with customer preferences and market trends. Refining brand strategy also means rebranding your design to elevate your brand above your competitor.
This is why brands develop new designs, campaigns, and other marketing efforts to meet the needs of the dynamic environment in which they operate.
Benefits of Strategic Brand Development
Enhanced brand awareness
After implementing strategic brand development, you will first notice how many more people know your brand. Strategic Brand Development leads to a substantial increase in brand awareness.
But beyond being aware of your brand, your target audience will be able to differentiate you from the competition.
Elevated brand awareness and recognition are two things brands like Pepsi and Mars enjoy in the marketplace. These consumer goods companies are easily recognizable in most parts of the world.
Customer Loyalty and Trust
When effectively implementing strategic brand development, you position yourself for enhanced customer loyalty and trust. A consistent brand experience is what births customer loyalty. When you repeatedly prove to your target audience that your products are quality and designed to improve their lives, consumers are less susceptible to switching brands.
Take Nike, for example. The company has been adopting strategic brand development since its inception. Consequently, the brand has established itself as an authority in providing quality, stylish, and comfortable shoes for people. Nike has become one of the most trusted sports apparel and footwear brands.
Unique Position in the Market
Strategic Brand development improves your status in the market. If implemented correctly, your brand can occupy a place where it is “untouchable.” What do we mean? With Strategic brand development, your brand becomes sought-after, no matter what the market trends say. Your target audience will always get to see your brand because of its unique placement in the market.
A unique position in the market means that even without saying your brand name, your target audience can already identify your brand.
Apple is a brand that enjoys this fortune. It has gained a strategic position in the technology market every year. The company has become a leader in the consumer electronics industry through its consistent application strategic brand development strategy. Its sleek, futuristic designs and multi-functionality of devices have ushered the brand to the top of its industry.
A solid position in the market means that even without saying your brand name, your target audience can already identify your brand.
As a business owner, incorporating a strategic brand development strategy can elevate you from being a new brand to a leader.
You can read more about brand positioning here: The Basics of Brand Positioning.
Improved sales and profitability
We have seen that strategic brand development makes your brand unique. That means your brand is constantly in the faces of your current and prospective customers. With consumers experiencing more brand touchpoints, you can be sure your brand will begin to drive more sales and profits.
Strategic brand development diagnosis
Regarding brand positioning, Strategic brand development diagnosis evaluates your current position and how your marketing strategy can help you achieve long-term relevance. A strategic brand development diagnosis is a complete assessment of your current standing as a brand and how your branding strategy can ensure its effectiveness for a long time.
Here are three steps to take to perform a strategic brand development diagnosis successfully:
Evaluating the Brand’s Current Position
When you evaluate your current standing in the market, you get to see your strengths and weaknesses. But what are the metrics that determine your current position in the market?
- Market Share
- Brand awareness
- Brand perception
- Competition
To diagnose your brand development strategy successfully, you need to analyze these four aspects of your business.
Measuring Existing Brand Equity
This segment highlights the importance of accurately assessing your brand’s value and influence in the market, a crucial step known as measuring brand equity. It guides you through evaluating key indicators like brand recognition, customer loyalty, and market share, offering vital insights for strategic refinement and enhancing your brand’s impact.
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Conduct a SWOT Analysis
Now that we have identified your current brand position, the next thing to do is to conduct a SWOT analysis. With the data you have gathered from evaluating your current standing, analyze your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. A SWOT analysis is fundamental in assessing your long-term relevance as a brand.
Perform A Competitive Audit
Conducting a thorough competitive audit is crucial for understanding the value of your brand’s position in the market and identifying unique opportunities for distinction. This step involves analyzing competitor strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and market dynamics to uncover unique opportunities for your brand to stand out and excel.
Develop a plan
Use the information gained from the SWOT analysis to create a strategic plan. This plan will solve your brand’s shortcomings and capitalize on your strengths. Utilize it to evaluate potential opportunities and threats.
Strategic Brand Development Process
Successful CPG brands opt for strategic brand development because it differentiates them from their competitors. Strategic branding creates a different brand identity that appeals to the target audience and, over time, fosters customer loyalty.
Critical Elements In Strategic Brand Development Design
Let’s now outline the fundamental elements vital to the design of a strategic brand development process.
Identifying Distinct Brand Positioning
The first step in developing a solid brand position is defining your purpose. Your brand purpose is the foundation of gaining a strategic position in the market. Once you understand the brand purpose, your brand development strategy has a clear direction.
The next phase of developing brand positioning is identifying and understanding your target audience. Gain mastery of how your audience thinks and behaves. Evaluate the demographics to match their preferences. This will help you properly articulate your brand messaging to suit the dynamic needs of your target audience.
Developing A Brand Messaging Hierarchy
After carefully studying your audience and positioning your brand, you can tailor your messaging to fit each demographic, behavior, and preference. Ensure that you consistently review your target audience. See how market trends and competition have influenced their behavior.
Creating Visuals To Support Brand Messages
At this point we can focus is on crafting impactful visual elements that are in harmony with your brand messaging, underscoring the power of visuals in storytelling and value communication. It explores how well-designed visuals not only reinforce the brand’s message but also forge a stronger, more memorable connection with the audience.
Performing Iterations To messaging & Design
Going through iterations to both your copy and visual aesthetic is a crucial step of refining and optimizing your brand. This iterative process ensures that your brand remains dynamic and resonates effectively with your target audience, adapting to feedback and emerging trends for optimal impact.
Unifying The Brand Experience
Your brand experience combines all your target audience’s interactions with your brand. Whether interactions with your customer service team or website design, ensure you provide a unique brand experience. Let your audience see that your offer surpasses any competitor’s offer. Every aspect of your business should convey your brand values consistently to your target audience.
Strategic Brand Development Testing
Strategic brand development testing occurs during the evaluation phase. This testing evaluates the effectiveness of the brand identity and messaging before it is fully implemented. You can call it the “pre-implementation” phase. The essence of strategic brand development testing is to evaluate every aspect of your branding strategy. Ensure that nothing goes wrong when it is time to implement the strategy thoroughly.
Brand development testing is such a broad concept. For the success of any strategic brand development strategy, there are different forms of testing that your company must undergo.
As a business owner looking to establish a strong brand identity, you should understand the following forms of brand testing:
- Brand Identity Testing
- Brand Perception Testing
- Competitive perception Testing
- Brand Message Testing
- Gut check testing
- Purchase intent testing
To read all about the fundamentals of brand testing, check here: Brand Testing For FMCG and CPG Brands. Here are the steps to follow for strategic brand development.
Developing the test plan
The test plan comprises a well-structured outline highlighting the testing methodology and the target audience. A comprehensive test plan will also include the brand metrics and a timeline to show how long the evaluation of the new brand identity will take.
Conducting The Test
Top CPG brands select a sample size from their actual target audience. They then test their new brand identity, product, or messaging on this set of people. Ask your audience the right questions to avoid missing anything in the testing phase. After this, gather the feedback of the selected people and analyze the results.
Analyzing The Results
Implementing a strategic brand development strategy can be an enormous task. Brands gather the feedback and reactions of the sample size to assess the effectiveness of their new brand identity. You will then be able to identify areas that need improvement from the assessment.
Make Recommendations
From the analysis, you can then make essential recommendations that will guide the implementation of your brand development strategy. In some cases, the first test is not always the last. These recommendations will help you when conducting another branding development test.
Objectives of strategic brand Testing
- Measure brand awareness: Strategic brand testing assesses how well the new brand identity resonates with the target audience.
- Evaluate brand perception: From the testing phase, you will see how the new brand identity enhances brand loyalty and trust.
- Assess brand messaging: By strategic brand testing, you can deduce whether your target audience’s message is clear and understood. Testing lets you see how well your brand values resonate with your target audience.
- Measure brand preference: You can weigh your competitive effectiveness through strategic brand testing. Strategic brand testing gives you a clear perspective of your brand alongside your competitor.
Distributing The Brand Style Guide
Consistency is a theme that is pertinent to a successful brand strategy all over the world. Each consumer goods company has a brand style guide, like a handbook that provides guidelines for consistently implementing brand development strategies across all business spheres. Establishing a brand style guide that will ensure a unified band image across all touchpoints is essential.
Data-Driven Brand Development That Can Guarantee Sales Performance.
If you need help attaining the kind of results you have read about in this article, we can help. SmashBrand is a brand development agency that researches, designs, and tests all products to ensure peak shelf performance. Book a time to discuss your project with our team.
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