The Difference between Business Strategy and Brand Strategy

You have a great idea for a business, and you are sure that nobody else has been successful with this kind of business before. But you don’t know where to start. You don’t have any idea about techniques in branding approach. When you ask around, some might tell you to prepare a business plan before starting anything. Others may say that it would be best to get a branding services agency to help you establish a unique brand.

So where do you start? Would you focus on building your brand or building the business aspect of it?

What is the difference between business strategy and brand strategy?

For starters, a business strategy is focused on how you are going to make money while a brand strategy is creating a brand to grow your business.

A business strategy will include the following:

·      Financial plans – including investments, loans, expenses, and possible income projections by month and by year

·      Marketing plan – including how much you are allotting to marketing and advertising

·      Building a team – how many do you intend to hire and what will be their roles

·      Overall operations plan

The first order of business is to create a business plan. You may opt to create a broad business plan that would include all the details on your plans, goals, and the results you want to achieve. The business plan will typically come from the founder of the company, a professional business strategist, or an investor.

Typically, you, as the business owner should write the business plan. You may get an experienced editor to strategically make it clear and concise, easy to understand, and the focus is on the goals and the main operations of your business.

Usually, it starts with establishing your company’s mission and vision statements. The mission statement will be describing what the business offers, while the vision statement will be featuring the reason why the business exists and the direction it should go.

Take a look at the mission and vision statements of Amazon, the leading online marketplace in the world.

Mission Statement: “We strive to offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection, and the utmost convenience.”

Vision Statement: “To be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”

See how they were written? Both are concise and easy to understand.

Once you’re done with these two important statements, you are going to create a value statement, which will declare what sets your company’s offer or product apart from your closest competitors.

In addition, your business plan should contain the company’s goals, which is an integral part of the business plan since it will be the basis for which direction your business will take.

As for your brand strategy, you will be focusing on building your brand in the hopes that it will help you grow your business. It would be helpful if you hire a brand strategy services company that can guide you in building a tech brand.

A comprehensive brand strategy should be able to identify how you want your customers to see your company and how you can give them the experience they are anticipating. You will be speaking directly to your target audience through your branding. Your strategy should be able to entice these potential customers to invest their money in your products or services.

Some of the items in your brand strategy are going to overlap with the contents of your business plan. However, you should make sure that your brand strategy plan is a separate document that you, the people on your team, and your contractors can go back to when an important decision has to be made as regards market positioning, website content, and product design.

The initial step to creating your brand strategy plan is to establish your brand attributes. Some of the important aspects of a brand strategy plan include the following:

·      Story of your brand

·      Purpose of your brand

·      A mission statement

·      Your brand’s “tone of voice”

·      Your brand’s personality

·      Your brand’s ideal customer

·      Frame of reference

A good brand strategy plan should be able to express the reason for the existence of your company and your product or service. A good branding strategy is able to convey to your intended customers the characteristics, attributes, and values of your company and the product. It should tell your customers why they should choose your product, instead of buying from your competitors.

Your brand strategy should include brand positioning – it is the unique, credible, relevant, and sustainable position that your brand takes in the market. It will also have to feature the employee value proposition or EVP, which is closely related to your brand.

If your company carries several brands, you should include a brand portfolio strategy and a brand architecture framework. If these brands cater to different sets of audiences, you will need to add customer value positions or CVPs for each.

As already mentioned, there will be a few points of intersection between your business strategy and brand strategy:

·      Your company’s mission, vision, and values are related to the established brand positioning.

·      Your organizational culture will be aligned with your brand.

·      In a competitive environment, the market segments, structure, and target audience will be essential to both strategies.

·      Both your business strategy plan and brand strategy plan should consider pricing strategy.

·      Both should consider market trends.

·      Branding shall precede all marketing efforts.

To make sure that there is proper integration between these two strategies, you should create a business strategy plan first, then build your brand strategy plan. In addition, a senior-level position member of the organization should create the brand strategy, with advice from a branding services agency. This ensures that the people who create the brand strategy plan understand the business and the business model.

It is important to point out that the most important aspect of both your brand strategy and business strategy plans is your ideal customer. Knowing your ideal customer allows you to fashion out every aspect of your brand to entice them to purchase. If not, your business just won’t work.