Yes, a brand plan PowerPoint presentation is essential to get buy-in from management to tell them how you will invest their resources to drive growth. There is nothing wrong with an excellent brand plan presentation. However, the reality is that no one will ever reread your presentation. And, don’t put it in a binder or on the share drive. Instead, try using our one-page brand plan template that gets everyone on the same page. Our one-page brand plan includes the vision, analytics, key issues, strategies, goals, and marketing execution. If you came here to learn how to write a brand plan, you are in the right place. We will show you plenty of one-page brand plan examples to help you follow. As well we provide all the brand plan definitions to guide you. Finally, you can get access to our brand plan presentation template.
One-page brand plan template
Does everyone on your team know their role and know how they contribute to building a successful brand?
I first developed this one-page brand plan template when I led a team with 15 brands. It helped me see the big picture quickly, rather than having to hunt through a big thick binder. Even worse is now looking through a confusing share drive to sort through a bunch of 50-slide presentations.
To illustrate, click on the one-page brand plan template to zoom in.
Most importantly, the sales team appreciated the ability to see the entire plan on one page. Many salespeople had the same 15 brands to manage with their customers. Unlike the brand team, they don’t want to work with binders or big PowerPoint decks.
Unquestionably, everyone who works on the brand should receive the one-page brand plan. As a rule, they should keep the plan nearby to guide day-to-day decisions. For example, below is the one-page brand plan template we use.
Your one-page brand plan template can align marketing, sales, finance, supply chain, product development, human resources, and outside ad agencies. Lastly, the one-page brand plan helps you stay focused on delivering what you said.
How to work the one-page Brand Plan template
The analysis section lays out the summary from the deep-dive business review. As a rule, you should conduct a deep-dive business review annually. Essentially, look at the market, consumer, channels, competitors, and the brand. First, what is driving your brand’s growth? Second, what is inhibiting your brand’s growth? Third, which threats could hurt your brand? Finally, what opportunities are facing your brand?
The key issues and marketing strategy section focuses on the top three issues getting in the way of achieving your vision. Importantly, put the key issues in question format. Furthermore, we introduce you to our Strategic ThinkBox which uses four questions to help you uncover the key issues facing your brand. First, what is your brand’s core strength? Second, how tight is the bond with consumers? Third, what is your competitive stance? Finally, what is the business situation the brand faces? In addition, the strategic solutions should be the answers that match up to each of those questions. Set goals to measure your brand’s performance against each marketing strategy.
The marketing execution plan section maps out the specific plans for each chosen execution area that line up with essential consumer touchpoints. For example, include execution plans for brand communication, product innovation, and sales.
To illustrate, click on the brand plan process we use as part of our one-page brand plan template.
The elements of your brand plan should include:
- Vision.
- Purpose.
- Key issues.
- Strategy Statement.
- Marketing Communications plan.
- Sales plan.
- Innovation plan.
- Forecast and financials.
To clarify, below is our layout for how these strategic slides can be organized.
To illustrate, click on the brand plan definitions we use as part of our one-page brand plan template.
If you are looking to go deeper on how to write each element of a marketing plan, click on the following link: Step-by-step guide for how to write a Marketing Plan.
Do you call it a marketing plan or a brand plan?
I use brand plan and marketing plan interchangeably. If there is any difference, it is usually semantics.
Nevertheless, it’s important for you to have clarity. As a rule, a strategic brand plan covers the bigger strategic elements, such as vision, purpose, key issues, strategies, and execution plans. Correspondingly, a marketing plan includes the strategic elements, but goes deeper on the marketing execution and tactics.
- Marketing Communications plans go deeper by looking at advertising, social media, SEO, or events.
- The innovation plans look at new product launches, innovation calendars, and project management.
- Sales plans look at retail, merchandising, promotions, and pricing.
Brand Plan template
We designed our brand templates to make it easier for you to run your brand.
Altogether, we provide both a strategic brand plan template and marketing plan template. To clarify, our templates include the key definitions and marketing plan examples to inspire you to write each component. Importantly, our brand templates provide our unique one-page marketing-plan and one-page brand strategy roadmaps.
We also have brand positioning templates, deep-dive business review templates, and creative brief templates. As well, all brand presentation templates are available to use for consumer brands, B2B, and healthcare brands. With each brand template, we include fully completed examples and blank slides and definitions that allows you to enter your own brand strategies.
For those who want all our brand templates, we offer a Brand Toolkit. You can get a consumer brand toolkit, B2B brand toolkit, or a Healthcare brand toolkit. If you are a brand consultant, check out our Consulting brand toolkit.
Structuring your brand plan
To illustrate, click to zoom in on our brand planning process.
Brand Vision
A well-written strategic brand vision should be the ultimate end-in-mind achievement, which answers, “Where could we be?” Reflect on future ambitions that would bring you true satisfaction. Undoubtedly, your vision to help plan for the long term and use inspirational language to lead others.
Brand vision examples
To illustrate, click on the brand vision examples you can use in our one-page brand plan template.
Brand strategies
Finding the Key Issues facing your brand
Lay out the key issues that answer, “Why are we here?” by taking the summary findings of the deep-dive analysis and drawing out the significant issues in the way of achieving your stated brand vision.
To illustrate, click to zoom in on our strategic planning process.
Importantly, our Strategic ThinkBox tool helps you explore the key issues facing your brand. Clearly, the tool forces you to look at your brand’s core strength, the consumer bond, competitor dynamic, and the business situation. In short, use the tool to come up with the best questions facing your brand.
Use our Strategic ThinkBox to ask 4 questions:
- Start, by asking what is your your brand’s core strength. As a result, make a decision on whether your brand will be product-led, story-led, experience-led or price led.
- Next, ask how tight the bond is with consumers. Using our brand love curve, where does your brand sit? Is your brand at the indifferent, like it, love it or beloved stage?
- Then, ask what is your competitve situation? That is to say, is your brand a power player, challenger, disruptor or craft type brand?
- Finally, assess the current business situation your brand faces. So, use your analysis to figure out if your brand needs to keep the momentum going, fix it, re-align or are you at the startup stage.
These 4 questions will give you a good start on your core strength, consumer, competitive, and situational issues.
Creating key issue questions
As we wrote our key issues in question format, then the strategy becomes the answer. Look how they match up. Our strategic brand plan example, Gray’s Cookies, allows you to see how to lay out your strategies.
To illustrate, click on the brand plan example to zoom in.
Video Lesson: Key Issues
To illustrate, watch our video on how to find the key issues on your brand that you can use in your marketing plan. Importantly, it helps you find the best possible questions. Subsequently, it sets up strategic solutions to answer those questions.
To view, use the ▶️ controls to play our brand strategy video.
Writing Brand Strategy using A + B + C + D
Within our marketing plan template, we provide slides to lay out your brand strategies. You should start off by writing your strategic objective statement using the four components of the a + b + c + d model outlined in our Beloved Brands book.
To illustrate, click to zoom in on our brand strategy process to use in your brand plan.
Here’s how that brand strategy statement breaks down:
A: Program investment:
First, the marketing strategy statement calls out the investment in a strategic program, with crystal clear marching orders to the team, leaving no room for doubt, confusion, or hesitation. For example, the strategic program is to “Advertising Gray’s guilt-free positioning.”
B: Focused opportunity:
Second, the marketing strategy statement need to see a breakthrough point where the brand will exert pressure to create a market impact. Essentially, the focused opportunity is to “to new proactive preventers.”
C: Market impact:
Third, the marketing strategy should achieve a specific desired market impact with a stakeholder you will attempt to move, whether it is consumers, sales channels, competitors, or influencers. For example, the desired impact is “To move consumers from consideration to trial.”
D: Performance result:
Finally, the marketing strategy statement must drive a specific performance result linked to the market impact, either making the brand more powerful or more profitable. Finally, the performance result is, “Steal competitive users.”
This unique strategic model will force you to pick answers to build a strategy statement with marching orders for those who follow your plan. Moreover, use these four elements of smart marketing strategy statements to ensure you structure the thinking.
To illustrate, click to zoom in for details of our brand plan template.
Furthermore, click to zoom in on our brand strategy examples to use in a brand plan template.
Video: Brand Strategy Statements
To illustrate, watch our video to see how we use our five elements of brand strategy. Importantly, this helps you structure your thinking. And, we will show how to build brand strategy statements that make it easy to explain them to others.
To view, use the ▶️ controls to play our brand strategy video.
Build your brand plan using the power of threes
I believe in “the power of threes.” Your one-page brand plan should force you to make decisions on where to focus and allocate your limited resources. The other beauty of the one-page brand plan is that it forces you to focus on less. That helps focus your resources.
As a guideline, for an annual brand plan, I recommend you focus on the top three strategies, then focus on the top three tactics for each strategy.
That means nine significant projects for your brand to focus your limited resources against during the year. Compare the subtle difference with what happens when you try to do five strategies with five tactics: the plan quickly explodes into 25 projects, and seven by seven leads to 49 projects. That would cripple your brand’s limited resources. What if you never get to the forty-ninth project, but it was the most important project? So, with fewer projects, you will be able to execute everything with full passion and brilliance.
I see too many marketers with a long list of things they need to do. They end up so busy; they have no time to think about what matters to their brand. You will have very little passion for any one particular project, trying to get everything done. In short, none of the important projects ever have enough resources to have the impact you hope.
To illustrate, click on the diagram above to see the impact of a focused brand plan.
Execution Plans
“What do we need to do to get there” matches up marketing execution activity to the brand strategy. To start, look at communicating the brand story, managing the consumer towards the purchase moment, launching new product innovation and delivering the brand experience.
Include execution plans in our one-page brand plan
For each execution investment, include a summary of the marketing execution plan, that might include a communications, retail, or innovation plan. Given it’s a one-page brand plan, use tight writing to focus the discussion.
Look for the big easy ideas
The principles of focus mean you have to limit the execution ideas to those that will best match your brand’s limited resources.
Here is a tool that will allow you to assess the potential return on effort (ROE) for possible marketing activities. I call it the “big easy” execution decision-making grid.
Take each execution plan and hold a creative brainstorm. Put each tactical idea on a Post-It note. Then plot the ideas onto the grid as to whether the idea will have a big impact versus a small impact on your business results, and whether the tactical idea will be easy to execute versus difficult to execute.
The top ideas rise to the big easy quadrant in the top-right corner. The goal of this tool is to narrow down your focus to the best three activities for each plan while eliminating those ideas that are potential resource drains. While you may not always have access to the data to find the ROI before launching a program, you should be able to use your instincts and judgment to assess ROE.
To illustrate, click on the decision grid to help your brand planning decision-making
Back-to-back one pagers
Now, you can get everyone on the team to keep the one-page brand plan and some execution plan handy.
What I recommend is to laminate two documents back-to-back. For instance, your agency should get the Brand Plan and the Creative Brief. Your R&D could get the Brand Plan and the Innovation Plan. Your key salespeople could get the Brand Plan and the In-store Merchandising Plan.
To illustrate, click on the one-page Brand Plan example and the Creative Brief example.
One-page Brand Plan examples
One-page brand plan example for a B2B brand
To illustrate, click on the one-page Brand plan example for a B2B brand.
One-page brand plan example for a healthcare brand
To illustrate, click on the one-page brand plan example for a healthcare brand.
One-page brand plan example for a consumer brand
To illustrate, click on the one-page brand plan example for a healthcare brand.
One-page brand plan example for a B2B medical equipment brand
To illustrate, click on our one-page brand plan for a medical equipment B2B brand
One-page brand plan example for a B2B industrial brand
To illustrate, click on our one-page brand plan for a B2B industrial brand
You can purchase our brand plan template
Click on the Brand Plan that suits your type of brand.
Brand Templates
If you are running a brand, or a service provider for brand strategy, our brand templates will help you save time and provide best-in-class presentations. We provide brand templates that help you run your brand. For instance, you can find brand templates for brand plans, brand positioning, business reviews, and creative briefs. For those who need to go deeper on marketing execution, we have a marketing plan template. Moreover, we have all-in-one brand toolkits with all the presentation slides you need to run your brand.
To view, click to zoom in the brand template slides.
Our brand templates will make your job easier!
Our brand templates are used by many of the best brand companies around the world. They reflect the work we do as a brand consultant and the tools from our Beloved Brands playbook. With each template, we include fully completed examples and blank slides for you to enter your own strategies.
Brand Plan Frequently Asked Questions
What are the major steps in writing a brand plan?
- To start, every brand plan must have a vision that acts as the guiding line to chase. Make sure you have a sales goal tied to that vision.
- Second, dig deep into a business review to focus on the strengths ,weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
- Third, use our Strategic ThinkBox to figure out the key issue questions that are facing the brand. Then, write strategies that answer the issues.
- Then, hold a brainstorm with your team on tactical ideas. Build plans to help steer the subject matter experts including brand communication, innovation, and sales/retail.
- Last but not least, create goals and measure performance. The goals should done at the end to make sure you measure the strategies and tactics.
Why is a brand plan important?
The main role of a brand plan presentation is to gain approval of your management team. This includes the C-Suite or CEO. Importantly, explain how you will you use your resources to drive growth on your brand. Essentially, the brand plan becomes the roadmap that everyone on your team will follow and help achieve your brand goals. Clearly, an effective brand plan will create the brand vision, purpose, key issues, strategies, and tactics. We love our one-page brand plan, and a presentation to support.
What makes a good brand plan?
First, the best brand plans present a cohesive story. That’s the reason you should have a good brand plan template. If you are standing at the front of the room make sure you keep the boss is following your story, and it will go very well.
Second, the best brand plans take a focused approach. Importantly, they do spread the limited resources across too many ideas. They make sure each idea has enough resources to make a difference. Otherwise, you will always be disappointed in the results.
Third, the best brand plans work to involve the other teams to ensure the team is aligned to the brand plan. Make sure you involve sales, operations, R&D, your ad agency. And, include all those who deliver on behalf of the brand.
Fourth, the best brand plan presentations seem in control of the conversation. Stay focused. You should have no more than 20 slides.
Finally, the best brand plans are highly organized. They tell a story. It all works together like an orchestra. Every tactic must line up with a strategy, or senior management will notice. And, a well-organized brand plan is much more likely to gain approval from senior managers.
What is included in a brand plan?
If you are looking for an ideal outline for a brand plan, here is our recommendation: vision, purpose, goals, SWOT analysis, key issues, strategy statements, marketing communications plan, sales plan, innovation plan, forecast, and financials. Our brand plan template uses this outline.
Marketing Excellence
We empower the ambitious to achieve the extraordinary.
Without a doubt, our role at Beloved Brands is to help the ambitious marketers who are trying to improve their marketing skills. Most importantly, we will prepare you so you can reach your full potential in your career. You will learn about strategic thinking, brand positioning, brand plans, marketing execution, and marketing analytics. As well, we provide a suite of marketing tools, templates that will make it easier to do your job, processes that you can follow, and provocative thoughts to trigger your thinking.
Have you gone through an assessment of the marketing skills of your team? Take a look below:
The fundamentals of marketing matter.
Our Beloved Brands marketing training programs cover different streams to suit the type of marketer you are. For instance, our marketing training covers consumer marketing, B2B marketing, and Healthcare marketing.
The marketing fundamentals that we show in this article are part of what we use in our marketing training programs. Ambitious marketers will learn about strategic thinking, brand positioning, brand plans, marketing execution, writing creative briefs, advertising decision-making, marketing analytics, and marketing finance.
Importantly, when you invest in our marketing training program, you will help your team gain the marketing skills they need to succeed. Without a doubt, you will see your people make smarter decisions and produce exceptional work that drives business growth.
Finally, I wrote our Beloved Brands playbook to help you build a brand that your consumers will love. If you are a B2B marketer, try our B2B Brands playbook. And, if you are a Healthcare Marketer, try our Healthcare Brands playbook.
We designed our brand templates to make it easier for you to do your job.
Moreover, we provide brand templates that help you run your brand. For instance, you can find templates for marketing plans, brand positioning, creative briefs, and business reviews. Altogether, we offer brand toolkits with all the presentation slides you need.
Beloved Brands video
Everything a Marketing must know about.
Importantly, Brand leaders need to know how to think, define, plan, execute and analyze with the best of them. Moreover, while the brand leaders don’t really know how to do anything, they are looked upon to make every decision. Have a look at our five minute video on everything a marketer must know. To read more, click on this link: Everything.
To view, use the ▶️ controls to play or volume buttons
If you are looking to make your marketing team smarter, we can help. To get started, email Graham Robertson at [email protected]
