Brand strategy must be flexible for modern business: why and how

This guide outlines the need for flexible brand strategy, why it’s important and how to achieve it successfully.

In the high-powered world of modern business, branding is everything. As Forbes outlines, branding is the one factor that enables businesses to stand out in the crowd, something of huge importance given the sheer amount of new businesses entering the world of work. What’s more, branding is not just as simple as creating unity of design between the various outlets that form your web presence.

To be truly successful, your brand strategy needs to compete in both the physical and digital mediums, while embracing both consistency of message and a willingness to adapt and evolve. Women, who have faced numerous barriers in their path to joining the world of business, know this all too well. Starting your business branding journey is best achieved through first looking at the physical.

While digital marketing is important, local marketing holds a significant part of brand strategy for the early success of businesses. As Entrepreneur notes, there are several distinct benefits to local marketing; local marketing tends to be less expensive than national campaigns, for a starter. Furthermore, you can often garner a positive response in the local area where people know you well – local people are often keen to support a new business, and if you have a name in the local area, you’ll receive greater interest than from anonymous consumers. There’s also a key opportunity for your business to differentiate. You can set yourself apart from your competitors by virtue of your location.

With that lesson in mind, consider how this might influence your brand strategy. Developing promo materials that play on the key aspects of your identity, your local area, and what your business offers can help to endear you to the local market and start making waves. It can also help you in developing your further brand identity. Local stories that really focus on the human nature of building a business will resonate with the national market. Play on that to your advantage when you start local.

The low-key and local start to your brand strategy and marketing efforts will also provide you with the first hint of consistency that you require to really make a success of your business. The graphical design that you employ with your first materials should be something you stick to. The good news stories that raised the profile of your business will be adhered to, and you’ll ensure that you pay the market you built in your hometown back by sticking to your roots. There’s also an importance in clarity of message.

According to graphic designers George Costello Creative, packaging and promo materials have the opportunity to leave a distinct impression on your customers. Bringing them back time and time again is a matter of presenting that message again. Whatever inspired or interested them is something they’ll be on the hunt for again – make it available.

Your brand strategy begins in the graphic design and message that you put across to customers. Consistency will bed that brand in, and help to make you really recognizable in the current market. How can this then develop further? Changing your brand message can be a difficult task, but it’s necessary. Women in business know this all too well given the rate at which attitudes towards female business leaders has changed over the past half-century or so.

One way to properly engage with this requirement is through social media marketing. As Rolling Stone highlights, some of the biggest businesses in the world have fostered a switched-on and progressive image by focusing on their interactions with customers. Acting as you would in your day-to-day life, and showing yourself and your human qualities as you would in any other arena, are crucial to developing your brand. Have conversations with customers; show that you’re considering the big issues of the current day, and that you really do value discourse and developing your own personal views. Showing that human side of yourself will mean that incremental developments in your brand and its values are seen to be organic, rather than reactive.

Sometimes, however, sea change is required in your brand strategy. This isn’t always a bad thing. The Drum highlights a number of huge businesses, from McDonalds to Mozilla Firefox, that have undertaken big changes in their logo and graphic design efforts to match a new world. This isn’t incremental in the slightest, but it hasn’t affected the business in any meaningful way. How?

The key is in messaging. If you need to change your branding and logo, you should let customers know about it first. Don’t sneak in wholesale changes to your business brand and design at short notice; speak to your customers, get them involved, let them know you’re considering a change and consider their views, too. You can even ask your customer base to consider new designs and give their opinions on them – this is the ultimate sign that you trust and value your loyal customers and that you want them along for the ride. To avoid marketing and branding follies, the key principle is customer investment. Get them on your side and anything is possible.

There’s also a lesson to be learned in the deployment of branding and marketing changes. If you make a brand strategy change on one platform, make it on all platforms. This is necessary to enable customers to know who they’re shopping with, and it also will provide a psychological benefit to you as the business owner. Irregular deployment of new branding and livery can lead to a situation where you have one aspect of the business presence differing from the next, and that allows you to backtrack. Flip-flopping on big branding changes is a surefire way to hurt your business; committing, even if new branding is less well received, is far less detrimental.

Underpinning all of these brand strategy steps is flexibility. The modern business is a living, breathing, organic thing. It has a voice, and it is an extension of its owner. By communicating your core values, you’ll pick up a loyal customer base that wants to see the same outcome for your business as you do.