Crafting A Successful Brand Strategy
By Lee Goddard, Augustine Ideas
In the last issue we discussed the critical elements for defining your brand. In this issue we’ll review the steps associated with creating a successful brand strategy for your destination.
In essence, a brand strategy is simply the long-term plan for the success of your brand. It begins with a vision and focuses on specific goals and success metrics. Flip through any business book and you’ll quickly discover that organizations with a clearly defined brand strategy are more likely to prosper. Companies without a brand strategy are more likely to fail. It’s pretty much a given.
On rare occasions, a successful brand strategy emerges with the inception of the company. Steve Jobs and Apple would be a great example of that. On other occasions it takes a new, visionary leader, such as Lee Iacocca of Ford, to redefine a company’s brand strategy. In most instances however, it requires someone outside of your organization – someone who is an experienced strategic and creative thinker, someone who can work through the process that will bring an effective brand strategy to light. That’s where Augustine comes in.
The agency’s role in developing brand strategy is to facilitate the discovery process – asking questions that prompt new ways of thinking – getting key issues to surface, providing relevant feedback and achieving resolution. Someone who carefully guides you towards that “Ah ha!” moment where everything becomes clear.
The resulting strategy will be a synthesis of in-depth discussions and discoveries, enlightening research, complex analysis, rational thinking, and creative intelligence.
