Way back in Chapter 1, we talked about the baby pigeon problem, which describes how most branding advice for startups rely on the example of giant companies but don’t provide tangible guidance for those of us who are just starting out.
For early-stage founders, the question has always been, “What is the path from your startup’s birth to a powerhouse brand?”
After completing a few versions of the canvas, I hope you now have a firmer grasp on the mysteries of branding, and that you see that, at its core, brand strategy boils down to a series of deliberate and informed choices.
That in fact, the process of creating a strategy itself really isn’t a mystery at all.
Throughout the canvas, you’ve researched, explored, and debated countless questions about your startup’s brand, converting abstract ideas into heuristics that you and your team can use every day.
What Now?
Now that you Canvas is complete, the process of implementing your brand strategy has only just begun. To help you along your way, I’d like to provide some parting thoughts about how to make your strategy real for your customers and the market.
With a complete Canvas in hand, your question now should be, “How can I ensure my team applies our brand heuristics and implements the strategy with consistency and quality?”
To find out, let’s walk through an illustration of how the work you’ve put into creating your canvas will pay off for your brand and see how the Canvas will influence various aspects of your execution.
Applying Your Strategy
For this example, let’s fast forward 3 months from the completion of your strategy creation process. You’ve recently reviewed your canvas and updated it based on market conditions and recent learnings. The strategy is sound, and your team is executing effectively.
In this scenario, you’re prepping for a multichannel campaign to coincide with a new release of your core product.
Product launches are innately complex, and as you think about your launch strategy, several questions come to mind:
- What aspects of this news will resonate with our audience?
- What will we say? How will we say it?
- What communication channels will we invest in?
- What about guest posting and launch partners?
- What are the main rational and emotional benefits will we focus on?
- What will the tone and personality of the campaign sound like?
- What kind of art direction will make sense?
At first blush, this inventory of things to consider might feel overwhelming. Especially considering that you must make countless other decisions about operational details, like timing, resources, and budgets.
While product launches and new campaigns are always stressful, your investment in the Brand Strategy Canvas means you no longer have to start from scratch when building launch plans.
Your brand heuristics provide a head start for all design, copy, messaging, and marketing decisions.
Here’s what I mean:
As you consider the audience, you’ve already defined the main emotional drivers of the people you’re trying to reach. In light of that truth, what should you emphasize in your launch? When you think about what channels will prove most effective for reaching them, consider the most salient aspect that you included in your positioning statement. Now have your team dig into all the places where people like that congregate.
To build messaging, turn to your message map. What themes should you focus on? What proof points will make your claims believable?
For copy points, your features-benefits continuum will help drive key points for your audience and help you move from bullet points, up Maslow’s hierarchy, to emotional resonance.
When you think about tone, voice, and creative direction, think about your personality
, and use those ideas to guide and inspire you
And of course, at the root of it all, you have, in your positioning statement
, a single sentence, everything you need to know about your audience, their challenges, and how your brand helps.
See Table 9-1 to explore how tactical executions map to parts of the Canvas.
Table 9-1.
The relationships between brand execution and various parts of the brand strategy
When exploring these aspects of execution | Look to these elements of strategy |
|---|---|
• Copy tone • Distribution channels and tactics | Audience |
• Copy points • Campaign concepts | Features and benefits |
• Idea generation • Assessing concepts and materials for impact • Ensuring clarity and consistency across materials and channels | Positioning statement |
• Copy tone and voice • Art direction | Personality |
In this way, the brand heuristics you’ve developed will help you answer key questions about your marketing, even in the context of a complex situation like product launches.
In the face of campaigns and the ongoing work of product and brand building, try not to allow all the moving parts to cause you to lose track of all the details of your strategy.
Putting Your Strategy to Work
Finally, here are several practical ways to put your strategy into the hands and heads of your team.
Make It Accessible
The canvas is great for discussing and iterating, but it can be pretty messy for day-to-day use. I recommend distilling the key insights into a slide deck for quick reference.
For most companies, that includes the positioning statement and key messages, but might also include your audience description. Then, make sure everyone in the company, including contractors, has access.
Stay On-Message
You’ve spent lots of time pondering and refining your strategy, but the rest of the team probably hasn’t. It’s up to you to encourage and inspire the team with the specifics of the strategy.
Tangibly, that means frequently bringing your brand strategy to the forefront of conversations.
For example, when discussing content, sales collateral, product copy, or any other customer-facing materials, ask the team how their ideas add to or detract from the strategy.
Eventually, your positioning and messages will feel second nature for everyone, but it will likely take many months before everyone is as familiar with the strategy as the founders.
When it comes to strategy, it’s impossible to overcommunicate.
In fact, if you feel like you’re repeating yourself too much, that’s probably a sign your only just starting to communicate with enough consistency to engrain the key messages in your team.
Revisit Your Materials
If your web site, marketing materials, and in-app messaging were all created prior to distilling your strategy, it’s likely that you’ll need to bring everything into alignment.
To start, create a content inventory, which is a spreadsheet for listing key assets, like various web pages, social accounts, or printed materials. Then, track their status with tags like “needs updating” or “needs review,” and include a date column to track next steps. You might also include a Priority column to track high-value assets.
As you prioritize the outdated materials in your inventory, start with the most-seen assets first, and work your way down the list.
Flesh Out Your Values
Many companies I’ve worked with hadn’t had a rich discussion about their company values prior to discussing the canvas. If that’s your situation, I’d encourage a separate session to unpack your values and finalize them.
Review Quarterly
You created your strategy at a specific point in time based on data from inside your company and out in the market. The reality is that those factors can and will change, so it’s up to you to periodically review your strategy and update it to reflect changes in the market.
If you need to make updates, take care to work as hard on the updates as you did when you created the strategy in the first place. Ask the hard questions and lean into the discussion.
Good Luck!
With that, you now have the knowledge and tools for crafting a brand strategy that works. It’s not always easy, but it’s always worth it.