Transform your know-how from business to brand

Leading brands always plan for the future

Long-term strategy trumps tactics, every time

Many small businesses fall into the trap of thinking their tactics are their strategy.

Of course revenue targets require tactics to achieve them, but leading brands always align these with an overarching long-term strategy.

Leading brands work towards owning “mindshare”, to be THE brand people think of when needing their particular offering. Think Heinz and tomato sauce, BMW and performance.

Owning a particular mindshare is the first step to getting a potential customer to buy.

Early stage business owners tend to juggle all activities surrounding customer acquisition. With growth, the process becomes more complex. People are hired, products, messages and sales evolve.

When things plateau or are not quite working, the fall back is to spend budget on more tactical sales.

Yet this is counter-intuitive. The sales function is the endpoint. A buyer has already made their decision to purchase or not.

Reveal the brands behind these owned mindshares

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Fortune favours the brave differentiated

Fortune 500 companies on the other hand, are more strategic. They treat brand strategy and marketing as an investment not an expense. They typically spend a greater percentage of their budget on things like market research, trends and competitive positioning.

Why do SMEs tend not to do this?

In our experience, working with many small businesses over the years, they tend to use marketing only when sales are low.

But what’s often missing is a long-term strategy to offer an alternative to their competitors to win over buyers.

This responsibility is often placed with the designer or marketer to solve, rather than where it should be coming from – the business owner and senior team.

A leading brand knows the position it wants to own in the minds of its ideal buyers. Done well, this often discourages other businesses from head-on competition. Imagine trying to replace Harley Davidson as the motorbike that offers individuality and freedom.

You might be thinking it’s all too complicated or you don’t have the resources to work on that same level as Fortune 500 companies.

This is an understandable viewpoint, and one that stops many SMEs from diving in, to answer those high-level strategic questions.

So lets give you something tangible to justify the effort.

Plan2Brand is a simple way to plan your brand strategy – to help you stand out, to stand apart.

Learn
brand

Brainstorm
brand

Craft
brand

Action
brand

Designed to make it easier to craft your brand within a reasonable budget and timeframe.

From brainstorming right down to the final printable details, Plan2Brand helps you craft a roadmap to take you from where you are now, to where you need to be.

Plan2Brand is not about design elements such as your logo, brochure or website, but a self-discovery eTool.

It helps you determine the core brand fundamentals such as: the driving Purpose of your business, the differentiated Position you want to hold in your market, and the ‘customer experience’ you want to deliver through your Promise.

Alongside these, you may recognise some of the other strategic branding components in the Brand Strategy Roadmap. They are not new.

What’s different about Plan2Brand is that it shows you:

How to build them sequentially to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and;
How to apply them, to help you define a 12mth Brand Action Plan of your next steps

You may feel challenged at first, but you are not expected to master everything overnight.

Plan2Brand teaches you about each component, why you need it and what it’s for. All you need do is bring determination and an open, inquisitive and objective mind.

It all leads to brand clarity, focus and growth

Branding generates long-term results, but requires commitment to a long-term strategy. Once embedded, your Brand Strategy Roadmap is the catalyst for many things such as:

Delivering customer centric marketing with increased ROI
Developing your offering through the eyes of customers
Always innovating to improve the ‘customer experience’

Making decisions based on your brand fundamentals
Having a unified team pulling in the same direction
…plus many more benefits

What people in business are saying…

You understand your business, but can get ‘bogged down’ in the day to day tasks. Plan2Brand helped us focus on what we needed to do to communicate better.

Tim Paul

CFO, Buslink