Introduction
Branding is about positioning your enterprise to achieve your desired business outcomes. Brand alignment ensures that all aspects of a company—from its products and services to its communications and employee behavior—are consistent with its core brand identity, values, and promise.
So what happens when your business reaches its stated goals and objectives while retaining its brand Identity? The result is Brand Alignment: branding that drives results.
What Does Brand Alignment Mean?
Why should you care? Knowing what brand alignment is helps in understanding why it should matter to you and your brand:
1. Align your brand
As you work to align the core identity of your business—the brand voice, tone, values and promise—with your desired brand positioning and messaging, your company’s product, service or experience becomes aligned with who you really are.
2. Alignment items or measures
Easier said than done, right? To track progress and determine how well-aligned your brand is, we encourage clients to codify the following aspects of your business, so you can measure and determine if your brand is aligned with your business goals and objectives:
- Differentiators
- Value points
- Value proposition
- Product or service features and benefits
- Pricing
- Brand experience
3. Example of Great Brand Alignment
GoDaddy has perfectly aligned their brand with their goals and objectives. They provide an easy-to-use platform to register and purchase URL’s and website hosting, and their branding, marketing, and pricing are all aligned with their goals and objectives. They revolutionized domain registration by making it simple and fun, and their branding and messaging.
Why Aligning Your Brand with Business Goals Is Crucial
A. Brand alignment before profits: Some business gurus teach that brands/branding don’t go hand and hand with results, but those are mostly the broke professors. The way we see it, branding is what you do with your company in order to achieve your business goals. Simple: build it, and they will come.
B. Steps to Align Your Brand with Your Business Goals: Here’s some practical ways you can align your brand with your business goals and objectives:
C. Strategic Planning: Our new clients get to experience this with us….we call it a “BrandStorm Session”, a form of brand aligment strategy. In it, we strategically align your brand with the business goals and objectives you are trying to accomplish.
D. Messaging and positioning: In this phase, we develop or refine the messaging and positioning to accurately reflect your brand’s product, service or technology differences, how and why you are better, and what is your unique selling proposition. You know you’re awesome. Now it’s about conveying that to the right audience.
E. Brand alignment and packaging: This is where you use your brand assets and messaging to express what makes your brand better in a combined package of your services, product and value proposition. This cohesive brand alignment is conveyed into your website, sales and marketing materials, social media and pitch deck.
F. Brand and consumer alignment: You have what consumers want. Consumer alignment is when you package your brand and advertising/marketing elements to communicate that you have what your target consumers are looking for.
Development of your company’s pitch deck: We help companies package their brand’s value proposition, then sync it with their goals and objectives, action plan and timeline to show your company’s path to achieving those goals and objectives in a compelling way for potential investors or clients.
G. Brand and marketing implementation: Putting strategy into action is where your brand, marketing and sales efforts all begin working towards your goals and objectives.
H. Brand and goals measurement: That initial shot-in-the-dark of marketing action is carefully tracked and measured to determine results. Your team’s efforts, combined with the expertise of your marketing and branding partner’s actions will ensure measurable success. These measurements also give insight into which efforts are most effective and if you need to adjust or pivot your efforts, actions or budget.
I. Tools and Resources to Help with Brand Alignment: Depending on what you are trying to achieve, you may want to utilize a brand audit, competitor research, business plan alignment, and a go to market plan, setting up milestones and tracking. Be sure to use communication and project management tools to ensure everyone is working together to produce maximum results.
You may want to consider working with a brand partner (like our personal fave, Brand Iron) and utilize their branding company services to develop your brand. This can accelerate your achievement of your goals and objectives. If that’s the kinda thing you’re into.
Examples of Brands that Successfully Align with Business Goals
Let’s take a look at a Brand alignment example: I love the old Ford campaign of “Making Quality Job #1”. At the time Ford was only hoping for quality manufacturing and delivery of their vehicles to be top of their class, a quality product with few mistakes or quality problems to turn their brand reputation around.
They launched the aspirational campaign just as much for their internal team as well as to reshape brand perceptions in the marketplace.
The change didn’t happen overnight, but the quality of the company’s cars and trucks improved as well as the brand impressions and reputation, thus increasing sales and achieving their stated goals and objectives. Mission accomplished.
Common Mistakes to Avoid: Please avoid these novice mistakes. We’re asking for someone else:
A. Being bland and boring: We typically get hired because executives are tired and worn out with their bland and boring brand. Take action before that happens, and pro-actively drive your brand for results. Or bring us in early to infuse new life into your brand.
B. Not taking action: If your brand isn’t producing or hitting your desired outcomes, instead of being passive and continuing to get worse, take action and start using your brand as a value asset to help you achieve your goals and objectives.
C. Taking too long: Companies tend to be too slow to take action and address the brand or marketing changes necessary to get to where you want to be. C’mon, man! Move it.
D. Not implementing the plan of action: Sometimes, when we develop an action plan for a brand to start producing results, we begin to see hand wringing as the realization hits that they have to invest time, energy and resources to make their brand work for them. Eventually, they do nothing and get no results.
E. Not working with a brand partner: Companies are great at providing their product or service. Not so great: trying to do their own brand work. Invest in Branding Agency services and get your brand moving forward and producing.
F. Not tracking: Once you’ve made the investment into your brand, be sure to track and measure your investment and the results it’s producing to calibrate your brand investment and maximize your returns.
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Start thinking how your brand can help you achieve your goals and objectives, take time to pro-actively align it, and develop an action plan for your brand to become a valuable asset, helping you crush your goals and objectives.
Want experts to walk through this process with you? Reach out to a Rebranding agency like Brand Iron to help you accelerate the process and turbo charge your results.
