I have really enjoyed recently working with my clients to provide direction on their brand and communication strategy.
The thing is these two areas are interlinked and if they are inconsistent in anyway they are likely to affect your results.
Your branding is where you should begin your journey – this sets the direction for the communications you do and incorporates your brand values, your purpose, your positioning, your identity and your messaging. Your communications are then the vehicle to get this message across to your customers which will aim to do whatever you set out for them to do – whether that is to increase awareness, engagement, acquire more customers or purchase more items.
If you skip the branding part and head straight to your communications and just presume they are right, it will no doubt affect your campaign and communication performance. As it’s likely your communications will not effectively communicate your brand and message in the right way.
If you have a solid brand strategy which represents your business correctly and then you create content and communications which fail to match up with it in the right way? Again, this is still going to affect your performance as there is another inconsistency here.
Lets look at a real life example. If say Marks and Spencer food, who positions themselves as a high quality supermarket decides to execute a campaign using value/money saving messaging and doesn’t invest enough budget in the delivery of the campaign – what is this going to say about the brand? There is going to be a huge mismatch and inconsistency between their branding and communication strategy. Their messaging and communications need to represent quality, quality and quality! Nothing less than this.
Branding and communications go hand in hand. They need to be devised in tangent with one another and they need to be consistent in order to achieve results. Everything must start with your brand and then once this is right, it’s then time to think about your vehicles to execute your message to the right customers, in the right place and the right time.
Need help?
Contact Lara@LaraDenney.com for hints and tips.