Your brand planning process is crucial for success. First, conduct a comprehensive business review and establish brand positioning. Next, identify key issues and develop a solid brand plan. Undoubtedly, this process provides an opportunity to make informed decisions. By allocating your brand’s limited resources effectively, you’ll achieve the highest return.
Interestingly, you may have heard people say, “We need to get everyone on the same page.” However, these individuals often lack a clear, concise plan. Additionally, they might advocate for “fewer bigger bets,” while simultaneously pursuing numerous small projects that drain resources. Surprisingly, these same individuals claim to be skilled decision-makers. Yet, when faced with two distinct options, they struggle and attempt to justify pursuing both. Ultimately, effective brand planning requires focus, clear communication, and the ability to make tough choices.
Brand planning process
First, create a comprehensive consumer target profile. Next, craft a brand positioning statement that balances both functional and emotional benefits. Then, develop a compelling brand idea to resonate with consumers and employees. Align the brand idea with the brand promise, brand story, innovation, purchase moment, and consumer experience.
Subsequently, design a strategic brand plan that guides everyone involved with the brand. Include the vision, purpose, values, issues, strategies, tactics, and goals. Finally, when transitioning to marketing execution, prepare a creative brief, innovation plan, and channel customer plans. This organized approach will ensure that your marketing team is well-equipped to lead your brand to success.
Brand Positioning
Start with a workshop to find the brand positioning statement and brand idea. This sets up a brand concept that will help your brand win.
Begin your brand strategy process by defining a focused consumer target profile, complete with consumer insights, enemies, and buying behaviors.
Utilize our consumer benefits ladder to transition your thinking from product features to functional consumer benefits, and then to emotional consumer benefits.
With our functional benefit cheat sheets, explore 50 potential functional benefits and 40 possible emotional benefits. This helps your team identify the right benefit space for your brand.
Additionally, use our tools to find support points and claims that reinforce your consumer benefit. Aim to establish a winning brand positioning statement that is unique, ownable, and motivating for your consumers.
Next, develop a compelling brand idea that serves as your brand’s 7-second pitch. Ensure it’s interesting, simple, unique, inspiring, motivating, and ownable.
Proceed to extend the brand idea across five touchpoints to maintain consistency: the brand promise, story, innovation, purchase moment, and consumer experience.
Lastly, transform your brand idea into a captivating brand concept and story, positioning your brand for success in the marketplace.
Initiate your brand positioning process with our consumer benefits ladder. Investigate a range of functional and emotional benefits to identify the most relevant ones. Draft potential benefit statements and test them with consumers. This valuable feedback will guide you in crafting the ideal brand positioning statement for your target audience.
Explore our articles on brand positioning
Strategic Marketing Plans
Workshop to build a strategic brand plan that forces smart focused decisions to organize, steer, and inspire your team.
Initially, embark on a deep-dive business review at the start of the marketing plan process. Examine every aspect of your brand, including the marketplace, consumers, channels, competitors, and the brand itself. Conduct key interviews with executives and customers, and audit your brand’s work alongside competitors. Following the review, summarize the drivers and inhibitors impacting your brand, as well as potential risks and opportunities for the future.
Utilizing our Strategic ToolBox questions, encourage your team to think critically about key issues facing your brand. Then, outline each component of the strategic brand plan, using unique tools to inspire thought and guide the writing of the brand vision, purpose, values, key issues, strategies, and tactics. Once all plan elements are finalized, consolidate the strategic brand plan onto one page and develop a formal plan presentation.
As shown above, our marketing plan process begins with a comprehensive deep-dive business review. Subsequently, summarize the findings into drivers, inhibitors, risks, and opportunities. Utilizing our Strategic Thinkbox questions, identify the key issue questions. Interestingly, the answers to these questions become the strategies. With this foundation, you can now develop your customized marketing plan. To examine the diagram more closely, simply click to zoom in.
Explore our articles on brand planning
M A R K E T I N G B O O K
beloved brands
the playbook for how to create a brand your consumers will love
Covering every aspect of brand management, it is no wonder that our readers reach for Beloved Brands multiple times each week to guide them through the challenges of day-to-day brand management.
Get ready for a mind-bending journey as we take you on a deep dive into your brand strategy. We’ll challenge you with thought-provoking questions designed to shake up your thinking and help you see your brand in a whole new light. And our unique process for defining your brand positioning will leave you with fresh ideas and new possibilities for how to differentiate your brand.
But we won’t just leave you with ideas – we’ll show you how to turn them into action. Learn how to write a brand plan that everyone can follow, ensuring that all stakeholders are aligned and contributing to your brand’s success. We’ll walk you through the creative execution process, from writing an inspiring brief to making smart and breakthrough decisions.
And when it comes tao analyzing your brand’s performance, we’ve got you covered. Our innovative methods will help you dive deep and uncover insights you never knew existed, giving you the knowledge you need to make the best decisions for your brand’s future.
But don’t just take our word for it – our Amazon reviews speak for themselves.
With over 85% of our customers giving us a glowing five-star rating and an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5.0, we know we’re doing something right. And with numerous weeks as the #1 bestseller in brand management, you can trust that we have the experience and expertise to help you achieve success.
Ready to join the ranks of the Beloved Brands community? Order our book on Amazon, Rakuten Kobo, or Apple and start your journey towards brand success today.
Take a read through our sample chapter on strategic thinking
Marketing Execution Planning
Tighten your bond with consumers. And move consumers through their buying journey.
We believe that the primary goal of marketing execution is to strengthen the bond with consumers and drive demand for your brand. Spanning across five consumer touchpoints, our approach encompasses the promise, story, innovation, purchase moment, and consumer experience. Interestingly, our brand consulting process ensures that execution propels consumers through the stages of the purchase journey.
To guide your agencies, begin with a creative brief that builds on the brand positioning and strategic brand plan. This brief will inform intelligent, creative advertising and media decisions. Collaborate with sales to develop programs that are effective at the purchase moment, encompassing retail channels, packaging, e-commerce, direct selling, customer service, and merchandising.
Additionally, partner with product development to establish an innovation process that generates new ideas, transforms them into concepts, implements a testing and assessment method, and ultimately executes a successful launch program.
Brand templates for consumer brands
Elevate your brand strategy with our powerful templates.
Our brand toolkit for consumer brands is our most comprehensive template helps you communicate your brand plans, brand positioning, business review and creative briefs.
Our brand plan template offers slides for vision, purpose, analysis, key issues, strategies, and execution plans, ensuring a thorough approach to your brand’s development. The brand positioning template guides you through defining your target profile, crafting a brand positioning statement, and developing a unique brand idea, concept, values, story, credo, and creative brief. Finally, our business review template provides slides for in-depth analysis of the marketplace, customers, competitors, channels, and your brand.
Choose the right template for your business needs
Marketing Plans for consumer brands
Combining strategic slides for insightful planning and marketing execution slides for seamless implementation, our templates are designed to propel your brand towards success and help you make a lasting impact in the market.
Strategic Thinking
Articles that will improve your strategic thinking skills
To start, take the opportunity to improve your strategic thinking skills. Look to the five steps to building an effective brand strategy.
We show how to use our Strategic ThinkBox, and lay out the five elements of strategic thinking. Next, go deeper on to challenge your brand’s core strength, engage with consumer strategy, or competitive strategy.
Undoubtedly, you must understand the business situation before making your next move. We show how to write the ideal strategy statements you can use in your marketing plan.
As you move to the marketing execution, you need to use in-the-box creativity to stay on strategy. Importantly, marketers need to understand pricing strategy, social media strategy, and product innovation.
If you are a B2B marketer, look at at how to use our B2B Strategic ThinkBox, Also, you can look at how we evolve Porter’s model.
What type of marketer are you?
We believe that marketers learn best when they see our marketing concepts applied to brands that look like their own. We have come up with specific examples – consumer, B2B and healthcare – to showcase our marketing tools. Click on the icon below to choose your interest area.
Brand Management Mini MBA
Invest in your future. If you are an ambitious marketer, looking to solidify your marketing skills, our Brand Management Mini MBA will teach you about strategic thinking, brand positioning, brand plans, advertising decisions, and marketing analytics.
Have a look at our brochure on our Mini MBA program
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You get 36 training videos, key chapters from our Beloved Brands Playbook, and a Brand Management Workbook with exercises to try in real-time. Earn a certificate you can use on your resume or LinkedIn profile.
M A R K E T I N G B O O K
b2b brands
the b2b playbook for how to create a brand your customers will love
As a B2B marketer, you know that the key to driving growth is a strong brand. But how do you develop and execute a winning B2B brand strategy? Look no further than the B2B Brands playbook.
Prepare to think differently about your B2B brand strategy with B2B Brands. We want to challenge you with thought-provoking questions and take you through our process for defining your brand positioning. Our goal is to expand your mind to new possibilities for your brand by using real-life examples of successful B2B brand positioning strategies.
We’ll start by showing you how to create a brand plan that’s easy for everyone to follow, ensuring that all stakeholders understand how they can contribute to your brand’s success. Moreover, we guide you through the creative execution process, including how to write an inspiring brief and make decisions to achieve smart and innovative communications.
Finally, we’ll teach you new methods to analyze your brand’s performance through a deep-dive business review.
Our B2B Brands playbook offers a wealth of knowledge and insights, including B2B case studies and examples to help you learn new techniques. It’s no wonder that 85% of our Amazon reviewers have given us a 5-star rating. So, join us on this journey to unleash the potential of your B2B brand.
