Five Brand Strategy Models

Do you need a branding services agency to help you develop a brand strategy for your tech startup? Yura tech business marketing agency can help.

To get started, learn the fundamentals of building a strategy. Also, learn about the different branding strategy structures on which you can base your own branding techniques and campaign.

What is a brand strategy?

So first, what is a brand strategy?

A brand strategy is your long-term tactic to help achieve your branding and marketing goals. If this strategy is successful for your tech business, it will result in your brand being widely recognized and highly preferred among your target consumers.

Such a strategy is a document of a plan of how you will deliver your company’s promises to create a strong brand image that makes your brand “top of mind” among your target consumers.

If your brand is top of mind among SEO agencies that provide keyword research apps and services, then you probably can say your brand strategy is successful among this segment of tech consumers.

When people think about online browsing as equivalent to googling something, then Google has become top of mind for searchers seeking information or products online.

That is to say that Google has been successful in its branding strategy.

When people want to know answers to questions they have in mind, and they turn to Quora every time, that is another example of the concept of top of mind. Perhaps, we can ask the platform, “What makes their branding strategy successful?”

The more successful your brand strategy is, the easier it will be for your target audience to remember you, your brand identity, and what your company stands for.

Structural elements of strategy development

Here are three areas you need to analyze when developing your branding approach:

·      Power distribution – Who are the people who will be involved in developing your brand strategy? Do they have the experience needed?

·      Idea generation – Do you need your team to continue generating ideas to improve the current strategy or implement another strategy? 

·      Process – Some organizations believe in getting people to agree that an action is valuable. Then the team proceeds to build procedures to implement the agreed-upon action.

Paradigms for brand strategy structure

Consider these brand strategy models for building a tech brand:

·      McKinsey 7-S – This is the seven-s model, which highlights the seven important aspects of building a strategy, namely:

o   Structure

o   Systems

o   Strategy

o   Skills

o   Styles

o   Staff

o   And shared values

According to this model, all these areas are interrelated, so a change in one impacts other areas. Developed by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, this model allows managers to determine whether a company (or a strategy in particular) has the structural support to be successful.

·      4 Ps (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion) - The 4 Ps of marketing is a marketing concept that sums up the four pillars of marketing strategies (also applicable to branding strategy).

o   Product - How can you make your product unique and stand out from the competition?

o   Price – If you are a leader in your niche, you can charge a premium price. Ask yourself: How sensitive are my customers to price?

o   Place – Do not expect your audience to come to you. Pick the location where they are and go to meet them there.

o   Promotion – Promotion is not just about getting your product out there. It is ultimately about generating revenues from promoting your products.

Where does your audience go to consume information? What kind of message do they like to hear? What is your competition promoting their products? Can you get ideas from them that you can apply to your own marketing efforts?

·      AIDA – (Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action) – Introduced in the late 19th century, the AIDA model is an approach designed to provide insights into the consumer’s mind. In other words, it helps identify the cognitive stages individuals go through during the buying process.

Thus, with this model, your focus is to lay down the steps you need to do to capture and maintain the interest of your potential customers at every stage of the buying process.

In line with this, your content marketing and branding should be geared towards:

o   Attracting attention to your brand

o   Generate interest in your products and services

o   Stimulate a desire among your audience to buy

o   Spurring your audience to do the desired action

·      Ansoff Matrix – The Ansoff matrix offers four strategies to grow businesses. You can use it if you need to devise future growth for your business.

The Ansoff matrix suggests four growth strategies, namely:

o   Market penetration – Increasing the market share of current products.

o   Market development – Seeking to introduce existing products into new markets.

o   Product development – Introducing new products into existing markets.

o   Diversification – Marketing new products into new markets.

Your branding efforts may be applied to any of these suggested growth strategies.

·      BCG matrix – The BCG matrix focuses on helping businesses see growth opportunities by reviewing their current portfolio of products. It helps businesses decide whether to continue or discontinue a product or whether it is better to develop a new product.

According to the matrix, products are categorized under the following conditions:

o   Dog – products with low market share and growth rate

o   Cash cow – products with a relatively large market share

o   Star – Stars are products in a high-growth market and represent a sizable share of their markets

o   Question mark – Products in high-growth markets but do not have a large market share

Brand personality for building a successful brand strategy

Branding is about showing your brand’s “personality.”  The goal is to create loyal fans or clients that believe in the values you want to project.

Thus, do not only focus on your brand’s graphic identity (logo, color, design, etc.). You also need to focus on turning that identity into a “personality.” It is “personality” that attracts people to a brand and the one that people can relate to and have relations with.

Building your brand’s personality requires defining and projecting your brand’s unique set of values, which is what people recognize and appreciate. If positioning is the backbone of a brand, its skeleton is the values it has. Everything else is communication.

For instance, Wikipedia’s values are excellence, engagement in civil discourse, and collaboration. So, with this set of values, people are attracted to engage with Wikipedia and trust its system.

So, you also need to identify the values you need to project for your tech brand to be successful. It can be collaboration as well, or perhaps, innovation.

Can you do a branding program without a strategy? No, it is hardly the case for success in branding. To know more about this topic, try the brand strategy services from Yura tech marketing and branding agency.