A brand strategy framework is an operational system that helps you manage perception of your company within the market.

Many companies will spend months debating the merits of different abstract concepts around their brand, such as their “brand personality” or “brand archetypes.” They will spend time writing mission statements which include a phrase like “we are an ‘innovative partner’,” which are both generic and oversimplified.

Once you have an operational brand strategy framework, you will be forced to make very concrete decisions regarding how your brand is positioned against its competitors, and how that value proposition is communicated to potential customers. All aspects of marketing and product development should be unified, and communicated clearly under a single central message.

When you build your brand strategy based on solid data, you will eliminate any "guess work" around what you need to be doing on an ongoing basis. You will be able to make faster decisions as a team, keep more consistent messaging, and reduce your cost of acquiring new customers.

The Main Parts of a Business Brand Strategy Framework

Your brand strategy should be consistent with the complexities of the modern business environment. You cannot have a static document representing your brand. Instead, you should create an integrated system that can support multiple product lines and adapt to the different needs of various regions and buyer types.

Mapping Messages for Different Buyers

When purchasing business-to-business (B2B) products, the decision is typically made by multiple stakeholders. Your strategy should identify and map the different messages that need to be communicated to each of these stakeholders for the same purchasing account.

The economic buyer will focus on the return on investment and risk mitigation associated with the product, the technical evaluator will focus on the integration and security of the product into their existing systems, and the end-user will be concerned with the ease of use of the product.

The framework will give the sales representative the exact words to use to communicate with each of the individual stakeholders.

Using Your Own Data

In addition, the value of third-party tracking cookies is on the decline. First-party signals play a significant role in your brand strategy.

A CRM system (such as Salesforce or HubSpot) needs to collect first-party data, use the data to create new messages, test these messages and analyse the outcome. These cycles allow your business to continue improving on its marketing strategy.

Managing a Global Brand Locally

A global brand must balance the need to maintain central control and local agility. When a global business operates in multiple countries, having a single, rigid marketing strategy for every area is impossible.

As a result, marketing teams in different regions may not comply with the central marketing strategy. Instead, the marketing strategy must include a central platform composed of core values and provide regional marketing teams the freedom to make edits to specific proof points in order to reach the local population.

Comparing Top Brand Strategy Framework Models

Different stages of a business and different market conditions require distinct business strategy models. When developing a strategy model, you should ensure it is based on results delivered by the model and not just management theory.

1. Kantar's Blueprint for Brand Growth

In Kantar's research, they determined the most validated brand strategy framework available to marketers. With this model, Kantar analysed the behaviours of 20,000 brands over a ten-year period with 6.5 billion pieces of consumer-level data.

One of their major findings shows a strong tie between market penetration and growth, versus brand loyalty. Therefore, instead of focusing on becoming more loyal with their current customer base, the focus should be to become more different from their competition to appeal to a wider market.

2. Adaptive Positioning System

The way customers search for information is shifting. Research conducted on search behaviour has shown a significant increase in AI-generated search results of 492% year-over-year.

Moreover, 36 percent of users have switched from traditional internet searches to exclusively utilize AI assistant technology. To further adjust your strategic position with these new technologies in order to maintain your position in your core market while immediately adapting your distribution/format strategies is by using the Adaptive Positioning Model as a framework for success.

3. The Trust Stack Model

The Trust Stack Model is a four-layered brand strategy framework for establishing marketing confidence in highly specialized B2B software and professional service providers.

The first layer of the Trust Stack Model is establishing the baseline credibility of the category. The second layer of the Trust Stack Model establishes clear competence through case studies, demonstrating value to the customers.

The third layer provides social proof from recognized peers (other professionals or businesses). Finally, as added peace of mind for your buyers, the Trust Stack Model adds risk mitigation.

4. Jobs to be Done Method

This method can be used for product development and also has perfect application in developing brand messaging. Under this method, you stop selling your software's capabilities, and instead position your brand around the specific "job" that your customers are trying to accomplish.

For example, a developer who uses Stripe does not want to buy payment processing software. They want to finish building their checkout page so that they can launch their app.

How to Build the Brand Strategy Framework Step by Step

Building a brand strategy framework is a time-consuming and direct involvement of senior management of the company. You can not hand the development of a strategy to a junior-level marketing employee and expect a good quality result.

Phase 1: Talking to Your Team

Before developing a strategy for the future, you have to ascertain your current reality of the company. You can only ascertain the current reality of the company by conducting 10 - 15 interviews with internally identified leaders and stakeholders.

Each interview will last 45 - 60 minutes. For a busy executive team, scheduling the necessary calls can typically take between three and four weeks.

Phase 2: Testing Your Message with Customers

Most likely, your initial draft of your brand position is going to be too general. As that is the case, you will need to compare your original claims about your brand to the actual reality of the market.

To do this, schedule calls with 5 to 7 customers that fit your target market. During the calls, ask customers about the category you are trying to sell and the specific value proposition of your product, without any lead-in or additional guidance.

The initial draft should go through three or four rounds of revision until the message is clear enough to be used.

Planning Your Budget and Team Time

If you have hired an agency or a senior consultant to create your brand position, you can expect to pay between $25,000 and $80,000 to build your brand position with an agency or senior consultant, and expect it to take 4 to 6 weeks to complete an agency engagement.

If you elect to build your brand position internally, expect it to take approximately 8 to 12 weeks to complete. The timeline for an internal project will require the time of at least 3 team members, with the team having at least 5 hours each week of commitment to the internal project.

Real-World Examples of Good Branding in Action

The value of a brand strategy framework is not speculative; it is quantifiable through the actual numbers generated by actual companies. The promise of "increased awareness" without showing an increase in velocity of pipelines and acquisition costs is meaningless.

1. Genomelink

A defined strategy directly correlates to the performance marketing. Once Genomelink refined its brand consistency and position, it experienced immediate changes in financial metrics.

The cost of acquiring its customers was reduced by 73% and the rate of completion for user registration was increased by 124%. The result was a clearer message with no ambiguity during the purchasing process.

2. Soylent

Today's brands depend on creators to promote their products and build up trust among consumers. Soylent successfully did this using a targeted Creator Framework to amplify its message with the help of just 10 specific creators aligned with its core position.

As a result of working with these creators, Soylent created over 5 million verified impressions in one quarter. Similarly, Bluehouse Salmon leveraged an identical structure for the launch of their brand and achieved a staggering 1,900% growth in audience following from year to year.

3. Early Direct-to-Consumer Brands

Premature brand architecture can be detrimental to fast growing DTC brands. Many DTC brands attempting to replicate the intricate brand architecture of large corporations often fail.

Companies that are scaling from $5M-$20M, for example, tend to be looking for ways to launch multiple distinct sub-brands to launch new product lines.

Although this may help to differentiate products and gain initial traction, it ultimately dilutes their overall marketing budget and creates confusion on the part of early purchasers. Startups should build and maintain one single, unified brand identity until they have reached sufficient scale to require multiple brands.

Keeping Your Message Strong Over Time

Post-implementation maintenance must be executed properly to sustain a successful go-to-market strategy. Building a schedule to maintain messaging within day-to-day operations will ensure that a strategy document is not simply abandoned after the first month, thus enabling the message to continue to align with daily operations.

The 90-Day Check

Within 90 days after launching a new strategy, companies should complete a comprehensive review of their sales collateral, including any new presentation decks, email sequences, and website landing pages that include the new messaging map.

Follow-up with the sales team to verify that they are still using the new messaging map. If they are reverting back to their old ways, retraining will need to take place immediately.

The Six-Month Check

A milestone for customer feedback is six months after launch, as it is normal for markets to shift very quickly. Six months after launch, gather a fresh round of customer interviews to validate your core assertions once again.

It is also important to determine if your messaging remains unique to your brand, or if it has started to be used by others in the industry.

The Yearly Check

A yearly review should be conducted to determine the direction of your company. If you have gone from a focus on small to mid-sized businesses, to large corporations; then you should revise your brand strategy.

You cannot sell a large corporation with a message for small businesses. Your brand strategy must be aligned with your new direction.

The True Value of a Strong Brand

Companies that dominate their industry sectors see their brand strategy as more than an artistic exercise; it is a tangible business asset. By dictating which framework to follow, you eliminate any arguments that may slow down execution.

The facts are clear; companies that establish unique differentiation and create a large-scale message are the ones who dominate their marketplaces.

Regardless of how you get there; whether using the Kantar Blueprint or an adaptive position model; it remains the same; you need to create a repeatable method to communicate your value, align your internal resources, and track the revenue generated in every active market.

Frequently Asked Questions

How should a new startup order its branding steps?

If your runway is short, you cannot afford all the thought-provoking or theoretical branding methods. If a board meeting or a new funding round is around the corner, forget about developing complex archetypes.

Use your best customers to create the product positioning map based on the problem they are trying to resolve with your product or service, and immediately build a messaging matrix that your sales team can use to close business within 24 hours.

Where do global branding systems fail the most?

The breakdown typically occurs at the regional level. The headquarters creates a strict framework and hands it down to the regional marketing teams for implementation in their respective countries.

If the framework is too rigid, regional teams will have a difficult time adapting it for their individual cultures and may circumvent the framework by creating their own unapproved messages.

To resolve this, upper management needs to create a flexible framework that mandates the core company values but allows for local proof points and implementation strategies to vary.

How do AI search tools change how we position our brand?

Generative AI applications do not browse the web in the same manner as humans. Generative AI audiences scrape a webpage for simple, direct answers, strong data points, and primary sources.

If your brand positioning is shrouded in corporate jargon, AI applications will not consider you to be a credible source. You must create your brand framework for high-velocity, clearly organized content that will answer customer inquiries.

You must build your core strategic message into a format that AI can comprehend and reproduce.