Brand Vision

The Clear Line of Sight Aligning Business Strategy and Marketing Tactics

James Everhart

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781637421734
• eBook ISBN: 9781637421741
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

In a global survey of more than four thousand senior executives, consulting firm PwC found that 80 percent of the respondents admitted that few of their associates understood their company's corporate strategy. And even that figure is wildly optimistic. According to research reported in the Harvard Business Review, 95 percent of a company's employees, on average, are unaware of or do not understand its strategy.

Brand Vision: The Clear Line of Sight Aligning Marketing Tactics and Business Strategy hopes to change that by offering simple, easily implemented tools connecting a company's marketing program to its business strategy. It's based on a critical premise: that, rather than merely a series of aesthetic decisions on typography and graphics, marketing can be a powerful force that helps a company communicate its strategy. Not just externally, but internally as well.

The author has covered this territory for more than four decades, working as a strategist, creative director, and writer for one of the country's largest business-to-business advertising agencies. He has worked with large international companies to develop marketing campaigns and programs from social media, search, email, and websites to more traditional print advertising and direct marketing. He knows this territory well.

PART I

Strategy: Insight That Activates

Brand Vision starts with strategy. Admittedly, it’s a thorny subject. In all too many companies, strategy becomes a political football. Top management wants to dictate it. The ambitious want to own it. Salesmen think it’s about beating competitors on every pitch. New managers want to change it (whether it’s working or not).

Often confused with mission and vision, which can be aspirational, strategy needs to be concrete. Actionable! All too often, the opposite is true. We’ve all heard of business strategies relegated to a shelf or desk drawer, never to be seen again.

Strategists themselves often don’t help. They sometimes revel in abstractions. Reach agreement by caving in to entrenched interests. Indulge people who think the company needs to be all things to all people. When nothing is further from the truth.

Admittedly, the marketer who would connect to a company’s business strategy is in a difficult spot, often being torn in different directions.

On the one hand, high-level executives, most often represented by those developing mission statements, promote an all-inclusive, universal view. They’ll typically promote the importance of people. Sustainability. Empowerment. Inclusiveness. Corporate social responsibility. Those are all great and worthy goals for companies to emulate. But they are not competitive strategies.

On the other hand, we have the sales organization. Sometimes, they want marketers to emphasize price. Essentially, making their job easier. But more often, they like the all-inclusive, universal view, because it gives them tons of room to maneuver. And be whatever a customer wants them (and your company) to be. If that means they sell to Customer A on price and Customer B on product quality and Customer C on close customer care, so be it. They’ll take the money and run.

The corporate marketer, however, needs to become the C-level’s best hope of advancing a logical, well-thought-out business strategy, both internally and externally. Telling the audience what to expect and helping the troops make decisions all up and down the line that reinforce that strategy and make it real.

Definitions

Some of the problem with strategy starts with the word itself and its current cachet. I’ve been in meetings where people throw the term around to describe their plans for everything from PR and search to Instagram and e-mail.

Let’s agree from the outset that those things can and should be strategic. But they are not strategies themselves. Strategy is a notoriously binary choice: Either you have one or you don’t. And having five is the same as not having one at all.

Here’s why. When you say you have a strategy for something like Instagram, you’re trying to say you’re not suggesting something haphazard. That the things you are proposing are important, well worth the effort. And that you have a plan that has been thought out, considered carefully. You may even have tried to outline the business case, proving the company will benefit. That’s all well and good.

But you’re also saying something else, directly or indirectly. You’re saying that your Instagram plan is so important, it doesn’t need to coordinate, complement, or play well with anything else your company is doing. It’s new. It’s too important, too special. It doesn’t have to work with your advertising. It’s too critical to fit into your marketing program. And yes, it’s even more important than your business strategy. It’s above all that.

Sorry, I’m not buying that.

That’s something your company simply can’t allow. Your business strategy is too important. If there’s one thing the experts agree on, it’s that.

Strategy Requires Hard Choices

Despite all the confusion and hand-wringing, a good strategy is not really that hard to figure out. But it is, almost by definition, notoriously hard to implement.

It involves making difficult choices and sticking with them. It requires concerted effort and diligent execution. It doesn’t necessarily involve brilliance, but rather courage. Honesty. Integrity.

But most of all, it deserves clarity. Strategy should not be esoteric, abstract, or confusing. Rather, it needs to be crystal clear, even intuitive. Orit Gadiesh and James L. Gilbert¹ note in their 80–100 rule, a strategy that is 80 percent right and 100 percent implemented is better than a strategy that is 100 percent right and not understood (or implemented).

It is what helps a company unite behind a shared vision. There can be dissent, of course. But about tactics, implementation. Not core principles.

All too often, special interests throughout the organization—from sales and product management to C-level executives—shrink from making the required sacrifices. That is the greatest obstacle to strategy. And even business success.

A clear strategy is critical to the marketing process, providing the substance, the spirit behind all your communications. Staying on message is a lot easier when you actually have one.

Identifying the right course is easy. Living with the choice is what is hard. You owe that to your stakeholders: workers, customers, partners, and stockholders alike.

Not a New Approach

The goal here is not to offer a new approach to strategy. There are plenty of great choices out there. Rather it is to understand what a strategy is, how it works, and how it needs to be applied to marketing.

This book also will offer some tools to apply that strategy across your entire marketing program, from positioning and branding to social media posts and paid search. And it will outline a process to identify, promote, implement, and live the strategy you have, along with a way to evaluate your success at doing so.

CHAPTER 1

Positioning: Who Are You?

Chapter Overview

The positioning inherent in your business strategy needs to drive all marketing initiatives. The good news is that most companies have one. The bad news is that many companies do not articulate it clearly. The process of defining and expressing that positioning is critical to marketing.

Who Are You?

Business strategy answers a fundamental question: “Who are you?” It identifies your core purpose. And it establishes your positioning, the central dynamic for marketing.

Unfortunately, positioning sometimes gets lost in the shuffle, as the pressure of everyday life causes us to sometimes lose sight of what is important.

But it is critical for marketing because your brand needs to embody it. Your social media needs to express it. Your products need to align with it. Your website needs to live it. You ignore it at your peril.

The Good News: You Probably Have One

The good news is that, for well or ill, most companies have a positioning. Actually, everyone has one, whether they know it or not. Usually, it is programmed into a company’s DNA. It may have begun with a founder or early visionary. Then it might have gone underground as the company’s early leaders hired like-minded people, who held the same assumptions, worked with the same customers, and followed the same processes and practices.

More importantly, your customers usually know it. At least, they know why they buy from you, even if you don’t. They have strong feelings about whether you’re the industry innovator. The price leader. Or the customer affinity pro.

So it’s there. It may not be well articulated. Perhaps it’s just assumed that everyone knows it. And therein lies a potential problem.

The Bad News: It May Not Be Spelled Out

The bad news is that companies often don’t articulate their positioning. It may be so ingrained, people stop repeating or referring to it. They don’t spell it out. It’s no longer front and center where it needs to be. And they may even forget about it.

There are problems with that strong, silent approach, especially when there is a significant amount of turnover, or when a company’s founders are replaced by the next generation. The new people simply don’t know, haven’t heard, haven’t lived the positioning the way the first generation did.

A related problem occurs when the positioning is viewed as obvious. The assumption is that “Everyone knows it.”

The point is that they don’t. And, over time, even the best positioning starts getting fuzzy. First, internally, subtly. And it’s only a matter of time before it gets fuzzy externally as well. Sales reps start selling on price or over-service their accounts. Or the company starts giving away a core strength, in order to build volume. And that is a problem.

Even worse, the positioning begins to be viewed as a description of reality. For everyone. As if the company’s way of doing something is the only way that task can be accomplished. And competitive differentiation does not exist.

The assumption is that “everybody does it this way.” And it’s impossible to conceive of any other way to do your core tasks. Your company might, for example, believe that the only way to market its products is through distributors. The decision was made years, even decades ago. And while that may have been the best choice then, things change. And the belief that your company’s present practice is the only viable alternative is s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Description
• Contents
• Testimonials
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Strategy: Insight That Activates
• Part II Audience: Intelligence That Resonates
• Part III Creative: Concepts That Captivate
• Part IV Campaigns: Marketing That Orchestrates
• Part V Measurement: Analytics That Illuminate
• Closing Thoughts
• Appendix A: The Brand Vision Creative Brief
• Appendix B: The Brand Vision ROI Dashboard
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index
• Backcover