A successful brand communication strategy will accomplish two critical things: Clearly support your brand’s positioning and connect with your intended target audience in a relevant and meaningful way.
This type of effective communication strategy can only be built by deeply understanding how your customers currently perceive your brand and how well they see your messaging aligning with your identity.
To achieve effective, customer-driven communications you should start by asking these important questions:
How do customers currently perceive our brand? How would they describe our brand personality or identity? How well does our current messaging strategy align with how we want people to perceive our brand?
What exposure or experience with our brand is leading customers to those beliefs? How impactful are current advertising and marketing efforts as well as online reviews and other social media sentiment when it comes to driving perceptions?
How relevant is our messaging to our customers? Can they relate? Does it hit home with them and grab their attention as something that fits their needs or lifestyle? Is it a brand they trust?
And finally, how well does our messaging stand out? Does our message break through the clutter and other messages customers are inundated with daily? And does our messaging differentiate us from our key competition?
A global nutritional brand was developing new positioning and wanted to expand its target audience. But first they needed to understand how their expanded target currently perceived their brand.
As an example, a global nutritional brand was developing new positioning and wanted to expand its target audience. But first they needed to understand how their expanded target currently perceived their brand. Initial foundational qualitative research uncovered that the brand itself was not immediately relevant to this expanded audience due to historical messaging strategies. Additionally, through testing several draft positioning strategies, the team learned that changing course on their long-standing equity presented significant risk in alienating and losing credibility with their core. This critical insight caused the team to shift their strategy and led them to stick with their current positioning. Their focus turned to building stronger communication and messaging that would increase the relevance of this positioning across both their core and expanded targets to tackle the barriers to trial exposed in the research and drive brand growth.
Is your brand looking to build its communication strategy and ensure it is aligned to current positioning? Here are four considerations to inform your insights strategies:
1. Bring key stakeholders and agency partners in as early as possible as you define and align on the journey and what defines success. It is important to sort through what the team already knows and any hypotheses they may have.
2. Have a clear understanding of your target audience and its needs and motivators to ensure your messaging is relevant. Consider foundational Jobs to be Done research to build out this framework
3. Conduct early testing on draft messaging to narrow down and fine tune what works and what does not prior to fully developing marketing content. Consider executing Real-time Concept Optimization (RTCO) or Consumer Co-Creation research with key target groups to get initial feedback and optimize communication to ensure it is clear, relevant, and unique.
4. Finally, take the refined messaging into quantitative research to mitigate risk and confirm the appeal among a larger sample, providing your team the confidence to move forward into production.
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