Strategy In A Week

Strategic Thinking Skills In Seven Simple Steps

Stephen Berry

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781473610347
• eBook ISBN: 9781444159998
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business Strategy

The ability to develop and implement a successful strategy is crucial to anyone who wants to advance their career. Written by Stephen Berry, a leading expert on strategy as both a coach and a practitioner, this book quickly teaches you the insider secrets you need to know to in order to build a winning strategy. The highly motivational 'in a week' structure of the book provides seven straightforward chapters explaining the key points, and at the end there are optional questions to ensure you have taken it all in. There are also cartoons and diagrams throughout, to help make this book a more enjoyable and effective learning experience. So what are you waiting for? Let this book put you on the fast track to success!

Brand strategy is one subset of marketing strategy. There is a lot more to marketing than just brand strategies but the emphasis, importance and power of the brand mean that brand strategies deserve a chapter to themselves.

There is no universal definition of a brand – like vision, strategy, culture, values – we all have perceptions of what we mean by a brand, but these may differ from someone else’s definition of a brand. This does not aid effective communication.

A brand can be:

• an identification mark on skin, made by burning (especially an owner’s identification on an animal’s body)
• a fictional character from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth
• the name of a beer produced in Wijlre, Netherlands
• a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen
• a verb – to accuse or condemn, openly or formally, for example to ‘brand’ as disgraceful
• a type of sword: a cutting or thrusting weapon with a long blade
• the name of 31 separate villages throughout Germany and Austria
• a trade name: a name given to a product or service
• the sum of all the characteristics, tangible and intangible, that make an offer unique
• the immediate image, emotion or message that people experience when they think of a company or product

While the last three, above, are all perfectly acceptable, I will suggest a widely embracing definition:

‘a trade name and all associated factors, attributes and messages of a product or offering’

An organization will want to enhance, develop and protect these factors. This activity is termed ‘brand strategy’.

The purpose of brands

The origin of the use of the word ‘brand’ in this business context is from the cattle farmer’s habit of placing an identifying mark on his cattle’s skin, originally by burning; these days kinder paint-based methods are common, which states that the cattle belongs to a specific farmer. The individual cow or steer then ‘stands out’ as belonging to this farmer. Modern business branding has the same purpose – to identify ownership and to seek to ensure that the product stands out to the customer or potential customer.

Few products are identical to every competitive offering on the market. A Mars chocolate bar is different from KitKat, which is different from Toblerone. For many of us, we have a shortlist of chocolate bars we prefer and our shortlist may include these three. In each case, the owning company (Mars, Nestlé and Kraft respectively) want their product to stand out to us and, by doing so, enable them to be our choice of confectionery.

In this chocolate bar example, the three global giant confectionery companies are using their brands in three slightly different ways. Mars uses the brand for both purposes – standing out and identifying ownership; KitKat merely seeks to stand out from other rival products and has an additional prominent Nestlé logo to identify ownership; and Toblerone seeks purely to stand out with reference to Kraft’s ownership of the brand in negligible small print.

How a brand functions

Identifying ownership and standing out are just the first step. The brand gives the product or service an identity, some would say even a personality. Customers are then buying into this identity or personality when they purchase the product. Their reasons for doing so could be wide, for example:

• Image: Someone may drive a Range Rover car to identify with the prestigious image of the car – the Range Rover is aspirational and expensive, by driving it I am demonstrating that ‘I am successful’ in a way in which driving a Tata would not.
• Service: Many people buy certain books from Amazon despite being charged a price premium – they are choosing the brand of Amazon because it consistently demonstrates reliable, rapid delivery, and security of supply.
• Quality: Large numbers of families start the day with Kellogg’s corn flakes as they believe that this brand has a higher quality of product than a cheaper store own brand (or store brand, or no brand) product.

So, the brand has the purpose of ensuring that the product stands out in the eyes of the customer, that the customer therefore identifies with this brand and consequently ultimately persuades the customer to choose to buy. The brand therefore directly contributes to business and financial performance by enhancing the sales potential.

A brand has value

Interbrand makes an assessment of the world’s most valuable brands each year. Coca Cola is the perennial winner of this assessment, valued in 2011 at US$ 71.9 billion. With some demise in the standings of Nokia, Toyota and Mercedes, the 2011 ten highest valued brands were all American. The brand value assessment includes:

• an analysis of the recent historic financial performance of the company which owns the brand, and the value it is deriving for its owners (usually shareholders)
• the role of the brand, or the propo...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half Title
• About the Author
• Title
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Sunday Understand What Strategy is and What It Isn’t
• Monday Understand What Drives Strategy and What Strategy Drives
• Tuesday Understand Internal Strategy
• Wednesday Understand Marketing Strategy
• Thursday Understand Brand Strategy
• Friday Understand Competitive Strategy
• Saturday Keep Strategy Going
• Endnotes
• Surviving in Tough Times
• Answers
• Copyright