Brand planning: optimising brand health
When it comes to brand planning, understanding how your brand connects to consumers’ worlds across touchpoints and the value it brings is essential. Being clear on what to focus on and what not to focus on is not always easy.
Our conversations with senior brand leaders uncovered the importance of brand relevance in building brand health.
Understanding what contributes and detracts from brand relevance and capturing actions to address this optimises success; put simply ‘where are we missing relevance?’ ‘where are we doing well?’, and ‘what should we do about it?’ all help to understand the current situation.
Using simple tools such as the marketing Ps to diagnose brand health helps to understand:
Consumer profiles, needs and occasions
Points of connection across all forms of communications (including packaging) and distribution
Cultural influences and how to build a better connection
How to sharpen the value proposition
The role of the competitive set in changing relevance perceptions
Being commercially astute
A good brand plan includes a brand health diagnosis which puts brand relevance at its heart. It spans the traditional marketing levers and includes external factors which influence consumer perceptions and choice.
In this guide we share 4 steps to optimising your brand’s health.
Assess the market situation
Assess brand health across the marketing Ps’:
Does your price - pack architecture and distribution need addressing?
Could your proposition, positioning, claims or comms be sharpened?
Would your brand benefit from innovation?
Identify growth opportunities
Understand where your growth opportunities lie
Do you need to build penetration & replace lapsed shoppers?
Is frequency of purchase an issue?
Should you premiumise?
Is expansion into new markets a priority?
Are innovation & new business models on the agenda?
Optimise brand relevance
Determine which commercial, societal, environmental and technological influences positively or negatively impact your brand’s relevance
Build on brand strengths and opportunities within this context
Develop a growth plan
Capture planned actions aligned against clear growth opportunities.
For each action, be clear on ‘what’ the opportunity is, ‘why’ it matters, ‘how’ to execute it, ‘when’ it should be done by, and ‘by whom’
Interested in a health check?
Futureful’s brand health checks are helpful inputs into strategy days and brand planning, and as a stand-alone initiative. We can run them as half-day workshops or as bespoke projects.
To find out more about how our strategic guidance and inspiration helps to connect with the zeitgeist, get in touch at …. hello@futurefulconsulting.com