Crucial Steps for Creating the Optimal Brand Architecture

Discover Your Audience and Tailor Your Approach

The road to creating a strong brand that knows what it’s doing begins with defining your primary audiences. Discovering your primary demographics will be the essential task that will lay the groundworks for your brand identity, personality, and image that people and other businesses will know, love, and trust.

What’s more, knowing your audience and creating detailed customer personas will help you refine your product creation and promotion strategies, while giving your employees a structured brief that will help them understand what your organization is all about. Audience research should bear fruit to the following:

Create messages that your customers and clients will easily understand
Create an internal brand roadmap for your employees
Classify and position your brand in the competitive arena for better recognition
Build strong media and content strategies that will echo throughout the industry
Refine your innovation process in order to remain relevant in your niche

Let Marketing Portray Your Brand in the Best Possible Light

Branding and marketing go hand in hand as the dynamic duo that gets a company on the proverbial map and makes a boom in the industry. Quite simply, without a comprehensive marketing strategy in place to position your brand in the online and offline world, you cannot hope to establish long-term success.

This is exactly why you need to ensure brand consistency across all important channels of communication through the use of creative production that will position your brand on every relevant media portal out there. But it’s not just about positioning, it’s also about eliciting a strong emotional response from the audience using values, messages, content, as well as mission and vision statements.

Define Your Values, Vision, Mission, and Goals

The foundation of every successful brand in the 21^st century is its clearly defined set of values and messages, portrayed by its vision and mission statements. Defining your long-term goals, your role in the market, and your aspirations will not only be essential for internal branding, but also for building a trustworthy image and establishing an emotional connection with your audience.

Your brand values. Values are what sets you apart from the rest of the herd, they are emotional triggers that will resonate in the hearts and minds of your demographic, so choose them carefully. When defining your value set, be sure to avoid clichés such as quality, excellence, innovation, etc. Everyone expects you to have these traits, so try to be more creative and personal.
Your vision statement. This is the business rationale that guides your brand throughout the years in the right direction. Your vision will be defined in part by your near and long-term goals, yes, but also your values. This is your chance to tell the people how you aim to change the world with your small contribution.
Your mission statement. Another big part of any brand architecture is its mission statement – the document that makes a more detailed and technical catalogue of near and long-term goals, but also defines the strategies and tactics that will be used to reach them.
Your goals. Every business needs to have clearly defined goals in order to build a brand – so make them achievable, time-bound, and in the interest of the customer. In turn, your brand will grow as a whole.

Focus on Producing an Emotional Response

It’s well known by now that clients, and customers, in particular, make decisions based on their emotional rather than their rational state. Yes, rationale plays a role in the decision-making process of every individual, but it is the emotional trigger that will seal the deal and create a long-lasting relationship between your customer and your brand.

Quite simply, one of the pillars of a winning brand architecture is the brand’s ability to connect with the demographic on a deeper level, moving away from the products and services it shares with the rest of the companies in the field, and focusing on the values that resonate in the hearts and minds of the customers. Only then, can you establish yourself as the leader in the industry, and set in motion a strong brand architecture your employees, subsidiaries, and customers will understand, trust, and love.

In Conclusion

Every growth-oriented company needs to have a comprehensive brand architecture in place in order to optimize brand assets, solidify brand image and personality, and portray the company in the best possible light both internally and externally. With these crucial steps in mind, go ahead and build the brand architecture that will lead your business towards long-term success in the industry.

About the Author

Raul Harman is the editor-in-chief at Technivorz blog. He has a lot to say about innovation in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. Connect with him on Twitter.