The one consistent theme our team experiences when working with various brands is the issue of brand gaps. Significant gaps exist within the brand including leadership misalignment, communication issues, lack of consistency, and no formal marketing ROI metrics. External gaps also exist in that prospective clients do not know about the brand’s existence, or that the brand look and feel is not compelling, or the core value proposition doesn’t translate well.
Brand Discovery is needed to take a deeper dive into assessing what the reasons are for the gaps and how to bridge them. Without the accurate information and intelligence gathering, fatal assumptions are often made and the brand is incorrectly redirected without sound impartial reasoning.
Here are 5 tips on leveraging Brand Discovery to work for your brand:
- Management Alignment: Hold a day session with the senior management to align on the brand’s core vision, value proposition, differentiators, and positioning. Ensure the session is highly engaging and interactive and is split half into discussions and team exercises and the other half into written feedback. Use group feedback to assess internal brand definition.
- Focus Groups: The internal feedback takes a back seat to how a brand’s target client community feels and perceives a brand to be. The client community is the final audience and each purchase represents a vote to support the brand’s value proposition. Conduct double-blind focus groups of a representative cross section of target clients to assess their perceptions about the brand.
- Competitive Market Analysis: Who are your competitors? What are they up to? By strategically analyzing the practices from your competitive set it will help see what others are doing to win market share. The findings from this action will also put some fire under your feet to innovate new approaches to attract new clients and add more value to existing clients’ brand experience.
- Leverage Discovery As A Sales Tool: When reaching out to key vendors and clients to garner their input on your brand, reconnect and communicate your brand’s dedication to ever continuing improvement and excellence. Use the discovery process as a tool to strengthen relationships and partner with all involved to ensure that the end result is a brand who knows who they are, what their clients want, and provides excellent service.
- Relevance: Keep your discovery process highly focused and relevant to your current organizational objectives- do not get lost in the details, or go too high level and miss out on which PRACTICAL findings will tactically help you today to successfully address and amend existing brand challenges.
