The Five Steps to Brand Development

Key audience research and the analysis of business plans, marketing communications, customer contact practices, and employee attitudes and capabilities form the basis for developing effective branding. As such, the primary emphasis on brand development or redevelopment decrees that one must be certain of a branding solution’s potential effectiveness even before it is implemented.

Optimization of branding’s potential effectiveness results from generating a brand and a brand strategy that matches a company’s business strategy, capabilities, and behaviors with its customers’ needs, wants, and expectations. And, it should do this in a visually and, perhaps, in an audibly memorable way. Research is the key to developing a potentially effective brand.

A Great Brand Development Process Should Include:

Step 1:

Systematic discovery of a brand’s strategic intentions via structured interviews of executive and senior management and a thorough review and analysis of all materials regarding mission, vision, and strategic planning.

Step 2:

Review and analysis of a company’s customer contact operations as they affect implementing branding alternatives.

Step 3:

Systematic discovery of employees’ attitudes and capabilities regarding embracing and executing a company’s strategic future.

Step 4:

Review and analysis of a company’s, and its competitors’, marketing and marketing communications to determine current positioning and available positions.

Step 5:

External key audience research focused on baseline measures of a company’s and competitor’s brand presence, image, and preference, and the audience’s needs and wants relative to elements of a potential brand strategy. Often times, it is appropriate to measure a brand’s current credibility and/or extendibility.

All five steps of effective brand development are measurable, and the effectiveness of each step is key to the success of the others, especially to creating revenues and value that didn’t and/or couldn’t exist without effective branding.

To read more about brand research and insights visit our website.

K.L. Berry is the Research Consultant for Monigle.  

Connect With Us