8 Powerful Brand Strategy Tools
A great brand strategy has the magical ability to humanize the brand enough that it becomes as familiar and lovable to you as a good friend. Their values resonate with your values and you become a loyal member of the tribe.
Reaching this magical place is not accidental. We use these tools to help us and our clients reach a powerful, simple, actionable brand strategy.
Key aims of brand strategy
Align your positioning
Understand your vision
Uncover your core values
Differentiate your brand’s personality
Find your raison d’être — your reason for existence
Communicate your mission
Create your branding design brief
Brand audit
A brand audit is a health checkup, a simple analysis of your current service offering, positioning, values and whether these are communicated effectively through your visual identity.
Key questions
When and where did your story begin?
What were your first products/ services?
What did you promise your first customers?
Service map
Brainstorm your services/ products. Understand the categories. Use the service map to help reach
The key questions
What physical services/ products do you provide your customers?
What are the problems that you solve for your customers?
Positioning
Where are we in relation to our competitors?
There are a couple of tools we can use to visualise where we are against our competitors. Plot your competitors and your brand on two charts. Price/ quality and market share/ customer satisfaction.
3.1 Competitor landscape from our Comprehensive Brand Strategy
3.3 Competitor analysis from our Comprehensive Brand Strategy
The key questions
What are the personalities of your key competitors?
Where are there opportunities for you to differentiate against your competitors?
Vision road map
The key questions
What are the three key things from your past that got you to where you are today?
What do you want to achieve in the near future?
What do you want to achieve in the distant future?
What do you want people to remember about your company?
What are the three key things you want from the next 50 years?
What are the three key things that make us who we are today?
Value map
A value brainstorm is a great place to begin when finding core values. Brainstorm your brand's values.
Example values: Passion, Diversity, Leadership, Collaboration, Integrity, Accountability, Respect, Quality, Brave, Building relationships, Championing differences, Humble, Curious, Open-minded, Customer-driven, Effective, Good value service, Efficient, Beauty, Function, and Reliability.
Use a value map to distil the values into 6. Three key values, and three-second level, overlapping values.
Consider your three core values within a larger story. Expand on these key values to find which is the foundation, differentiator and driving value.
Simplify your values using a value pyramid:
The key questions
What are your three most important brand values?
What are your foundation, differentiator and driving values?
Brand archetypes
Brand archetypes are an incredibly powerful tool in aligning the team on your competitor’s personalities.
Consider your competitor’s brand archetypes. Place your competitors on the brand archetype wheel. Considering the remaining spaces, is there an opportunity for your brand to explore?
Mission mapping
Start your brand's mission by considering first what you provide. The physical and tangible products and services. Then reduce that into your how, and finally, your why.
The key questions
What does our business offer?
How are we unique?
If not for profit, why should we exist?
Visual metaphors
The visual reference is drawn from visual expressions. This mood board sets the context for the brand and might consider visuals, graphics, colour palettes and the general aesthetic mood. This mood board is the first step in creating visuals from strategy and should start to gently paint a visual flavour for the new brand.
The key questions
What personality traits can be pulled from the core values?
What visual expressions can be pulled from the personality traits?
Brand strategy document
A brand strategy framework is a great way to focus the team on a single document throughout the process. The document can be used throughout as a framework, and after the process as a reviewable document.
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About BrandWerks —
BrandWerks is a design resource company focused on advancing the practice of brand strategy.
We know that brand strategy can be a difficult beast to master. We create brand strategy templates and resources that help designers, agencies, and brand strategists master brand strategy.
Our tools are actionable and fully customizable and founded in a commercial approach that helps guide you and your clients through the process.