Brand Strategy Key Concepts & Steps

Before you begin

Before working on your brand strategy, make sure you’ve identified your competitive positioning strategy – your brand strategy will bring it to life.

If you have a brand strategy, make sure it’s as effective as possible

• Poll your customers, employees and vendors by conducting a brand audit. Are their impressions consistent with your strategy? If not, work on the elements you can improve.

Develop your brand around emotional benefits

• List the features and benefits of your product / service. A feature is an attribute – a color, a configuration; a benefit is what that feature does for the customer.
• Determine which benefits are most important to each of your customer segments.
• Identify which benefits are emotional – the most powerful brand strategies tap into emotions, even among business buyers.
• Look at the emotional benefits and boil them down to one thing that your customers should think of when they think of you. That’s what your brand should represent.

Define your brand personality, story and positioning statements

• Think of your brand as a person with a distinct personality. Describe him or her, then convey these brand personality traits in everything you do and create.
• Write positioning statements and a story about your brand; use this brand messaging throughout your company materials.
• Choose colors, fonts and other visual elements that match your personality and create your corporate identity.
• Determine how your employees will interact with prospects and customers to convey the personality and make sure your brand “lives” within your company.

After Brand Strategy

Together with your competitive positioning strategy, your brand strategy is the essence of what you represent. A great brand strategy helps you communicate more effectively with your market, so follow it in every interaction you have with your prospects and customers.

If you’re wondering how to choose a great brand name, complete your written brand strategy before you start the naming process. Since your name is an extension of your brand, it’ll be much easier to evaluate the quality of your name choices (instead of starting with the name) with it completed.

Keep it simple. Keep the design as simple and small as possible [Saltzer 74, Saltzer 75]. Complex designs increase the likelihood that errors will be made in their implementation, configuration, and use. Additionally, the effort required to achieve an appropriate level of assurance increases dramatically as security mechanisms become more complex.
Default deny. Base access decisions on permission rather than exclusion. This means that, by default, access is denied and the protection scheme identifies conditions under which access is permitted [Saltzer 74, Saltzer 75].

Adhere to the principle of least privilege. Every process should execute with the the least set of privileges necessary to complete the job. Any elevated permission should be held for a minimum time. This approach reduces the opportunities an attacker has to execute arbitrary code with elevated privileges [Saltzer 74, Saltzer 75].
Sanitize data sent to other systems. Sanitize all data passed to complex subsystems [C STR02-A] such as command shells, relational databases, and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. Attackers may be able to invoke unused functionality in these components through the use of SQL, command, or other injection attacks. This is not necessarily an input validation problem because the complex subsystem being invoked does not understand the context in which the call is made. Because the calling process understands the context, it is responsible for sanitizing the data before invoking the subsystem.

Practice defense in depth. Manage risk with multiple defensive strategies, so that if one layer of defense turns out to be inadequate, another layer of defense can prevent a security flaw from becoming an exploitable vulnerability and/or limit the consequences of a successful exploit. For example, combining secure programming techniques with secure runtime environments should reduce the likelihood that vulnerabilities remaining in the code at deployment time can be exploited in the operational environment [Seacord 05].

Use effective quality assurance techniques. Good quality assurance techniques can be effective in identifying and eliminating vulnerabilities. Fuzz testing, penetration testing, and source code audits should all be incorporated as part of an effective quality assurance program. Independent security reviews can lead to more secure systems. External reviewers bring an independent perspective; for example, in identifying and correcting invalid assumptions [Seacord 05].
Adopt a secure coding standard. Develop and/or apply a secure coding standard for your target development language and platform.

Establish your goals

One of the first things you need to do before starting work on a Web design project is to be clear about your client or organization’s goals. What are you trying to achieve with the new website or redesign? What is the website’s main purpose? Ask your client, your manager or yourself what those are. If they or you don’t know yet, then they should be discussed and agreed upon. A clear direction is essential if you want your design to have a purpose.

Identify your audience

Who your audience is will play a big role in how your website should look and function. There are many demographics here that can influence your design, ones like age, gender, profession and technical competency.

Determine your brand image

A lot of designers tend to get a little too inspired by the latest trends and then implement them without thinking first about what sort of image they really should be conveying. Glossy buttons, gradients and reflective floors may work for some websites, but they may not be right for your brand.

Goal-driven design direction

You’ve established the purpose of your website, set some goals you want to achieve, identified your audience and determined your brand image. You can now proceed to implement it. So how do you make design decisions sync with your strategy?

Measure results

Once you’ve designed and deployed your website, it’s time to measure your success. This is just as important as the first two steps because until you test how well your design performs, you won’t know whether or not it is effective in fulfilling your goals.

Kaizen

There is a Japanese philosophy called “Kaizen,” which focuses on continuous improvement using small steps. When you work on your website, you should be thinking of Kaizen because the version you’ve just published is not the final version. There doesn’t even have to be a final version.

In this digitally cluttered marketplace, print material and marketing collateral serve as an incomparable visual experience for your customers. Have us create your business cards, annual reports, brochures and event tradeshow displays to help you reach out to more customers in a unique, impactful way.

Artisan Creative also offers custom illustrations – nothing can devalue your business like overused clip-art and cheesy stock photography, so let us design something that’s memorable and differentiates your brand from your competitors.

The Game Plan

How do you plan in the design phase to make implementing animation more efficient in the development phase? Here is what the Daylight team has found to be effective.

Step 1

Animation will help shape the personality of a website. With that in mind, before you add animation you first need to decide what your brand’s voice and tone look like and then what type of animations would display that voice visually.

Step 2

Now that a style and feeling has been chosen and documented, it’s time to search for opportunities to implement animations. List the opportunities in order of importance, starting with the those that best support the product’s goals. Guiding the user through interaction points like hovering over a button, clicking a link, displaying error messages and submitting a form, should be your focus.

Step 3

Using your new list of animation opportunities, uncover the individual components that need to be designed. How you approach the design of an animation is a bit tricky and can be handled many ways depending on team preferences and ability. One quick approach is to search for examples and compile a small library. Examples may be displayed in many respects, like screen captures, URLs of websites, Codepen examples, custom designed animation videos or links to demos. Gather whatever model type works best for your team and catalog them with your list from step 2. Now you know where you want animations and how the motion should look.

Step 4

Review your final list and example catalog for consistency. This simple step is of great importance to avoid common pitfalls that come with adding animation. In Step 4 you might decide to rank the list as Phase 1 vs. Phase 2 based on expected budget constraints. Or you might even cut out some animations that seem unnecessary. Most importantly, you look for patterns and add, adjust or subtract animations so that similar components will have similar motion.