Why it is important to make the Brand Strategy / Brand Plan distinction
When our Partners first started out, the resources available were limited, and the training to support a marketing career was sketchy at best. A 3 step plan to advise how to build a better brand strategy and a better brand plan would have resulted in increased brand growth.
Wow, how things have changed. Gone are the limitations, replaced with opportunities to learn from the foremost minds in the field. Engage with Mark Ritson’s mMBA programme, explore the scientific strategies of The Ehrenberg Bass Institute, or delve into seminal works such as ‘The Long & The Short of It’ by Binet & Field. This knowledge serves as an indispensable foundation to construct an evidence-based brand strategy, so why, then, are so many strategies we see at best strong internal plans?
We believe there needs to be a clear distinction between Brand Planning and Brand Strategy.
Both are important, but they play very different roles.
Roger Martin summarises this brilliantly:
“A strategy is about making choices to influence the things you can’t control.”
In other words, as a marketer, what are you doing to convince a buyer of the category you operate in, to buy your brand? Why does this fit Roger’s definition? It is because you don’t control the buyer.
Whereas a Plan involves you making the choices that are within your control, for example, you might choose to prioritise one brand over another in your portfolio. As the marketing lead, the portfolio is under your control.
At this point, we would suggest to you that you have a brand plan without navigating through a formal Brand Planning process. In fact, we would go as far as to say the best Marketing Leaders don’t spend months on brand planning. They understand a protracted process can be a distraction to the business, an energy drain for their people and often, the output looks very much like where the brand started the process (if not to the brand team, almost certainly to the CFO).
Because they are clear on their strategy the best leaders don’t need Brand Planning to identify opportunities, they identify them in flight and assign ‘agile’ teams to get after them. The same applies to their approach of overcoming challenges and course correcting rather than stopping and starting.
The best marketing leaders don’t need Brand Planning to secure annual budgets. The investments are laid out in the LRP and aligned with the CFO, (Board and Investors). Yes, there are likely to be adjustments to reflect the latest business context, but because the commercial outputs are already linked to the investments, this is a straightforward discussion.
So now that we can see the differences between the brand plan and the brand strategy let us focus on how to build a brand strategy worth investing in.
Understand the 95:5 rule for a Better Brand Strategy
On average…
Only 5% of your customers are buying the category now.
The other 95% are buying in the future.
A concept introduced by Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute.
This means you have to get your brand on the “mental shortlist for tomorrow”. (A nice summation from another John, this time Jon Evans of Uncensored CMO fame). To understand whether you are likely to achieve this objective you have to know your brand’s Mental Availability score.
Mental Availability “is about making your brand known and easily thought of in buying situations” (Professor Jenni Romaniuk, Ehrenberg Bass Institute and author of Better Brand Health).
This approach to brand growth is supported by incredibly successful brand-building organisations like Diageo, Mars, McDonalds and Suntory (all of whom are corporate sponsors of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute).
Our Three Steps to a Better Brand Strategy
Step 1. Brand Diagnosis via a Mental Availability Assessment
Follow this link to understand the key measurements of Mental Availability and the potential consequences for your brand. For now, suffice to say the best strategies are built on Category Buyer insight derived from a Mental Availability assessment, enabling you to understand the likelihood of your brand being retrieved from the memory of buyers relative to the competition.
Step 2. Developing hypotheses
There are a number of anticipated correlations between particular Mental Availability measures, such as Mental Market Share* and actual Sales Market Share. A deviation from the expected relationship enables further analysis and the development of hypotheses. For example, if Mental Market Share is higher than Sales Market Share, then a hypothesis could be to improve Physical Availability through increased product distribution. Whereas if the Mental Market Share is lower than the Sales Market Share, your hypothesis could be to extend the brand’s reach to more category buyers by increasing media investment or reducing the £’s spent on building relationships with existing buyers.
*Mental Market Share indicates how likely the brand is to be retrieved in memory now and in the future.
Step 3. Precise Objectives
To help migrate the appropriate hypotheses into a set of meaningful objectives our recommendation to any marketing lead is to concentrate on these 3 areas:
- where will the GROWTH come from?
- what needs to be FIXED?
- where does the brand need to DEFEND?
These steps provide a strong foundation for the development of your strategies. We do not intend them to be exclusive input, as you will have a number of other relevant data points, such as your current sales performance, your wider business context, or perhaps a competitor launch that is too early in its lifecycle to be picked up in the Mental Availability assessment or your current Brand Health tracker. But we do believe that your chances of growth are greatly enhanced if steps 1 to 3 are core to informing your strategy.
Brand Strategy Tips
The best strategies recruit more Category Buyers to your Brand.
The best strategies are Commercially actionable (e.g. the sales teams believe in and are committed to your Plan).
The best strategies are Financially adaptable to the extent that the CFO is given the flexibility to adjust and phase investment to meet business milestones without impacting the integrity of your strategy.
Final Brand Strategy Output:
Before you press send on your brand strategy or present it to your CFO or the Board here is a helpful checklist.
- Think about how the brand’s strategy might be conveyed by the CFO to Investors. Is it a credible story for this group?
- Are the objectives easy to understand externally and across the wider organisation?
- Is the strategy balanced to deliver against the short-term milestones of the business AND the long-term needs of the brand?
- Have you reduced waste and optimised spend by minimising your ‘non-working’ investment? (Unilever states that more than 80% of its marketing spend goes directly into media).
- Are the metrics transparent, consistent and understood by all?
Hopefully, you are able to put a tick against each of these. If so, you are good to go. If you want a pair of empathetic eyes to take a look, then feel free to get in touch. We would be more than happy to offer a point of view.
Recommended Video:
If you want to watch a video looking at the merits of a Mental Availability Assessment then head to our video here or head to youtube and take a look:
Connect with the partners at SmilingCFO on LinkedIn:
Martin Coyle (Video)
Mark Smith
