While my heart goes out to the management of Bokku Mart, and I genuinely pray for their recovery from the recent PR storm they are navigating, there is a lesson I would like to share on matters of brand strategy and proactive brand management.
This is something many businesses don’t understand, including many creatives who just toy around with the matters of brand strategy without proper training.
Brand strategy isn’t just some fancy buzzwords that anyone should mindlessly play with. If you do, it will bite when the rubber hits the road and things get serious. Now, from my professional experience, three key stages of brand strategy are very crucial to the long-term success of any business: the brand core strategy, the positioning strategy, and the implementation strategy. I’ll talk a little about these three in a bit.
The truth is, to be an excellent creative, you need to understand strategy, be able to interpret it, and be able to convert it into tangible communications that connect directly with the intended market and that portray the brand in the desired light.
On no occasion should a creative get on a task for a brand without understanding the personality (character, tone, and voice) of the brand, which is derived from the positioning strategy.
And for every brand implementation, there are supposed to be guardrails. These guardrails help to identify the scope of creative freedom you have as a creative and the boundaries you shouldn’t cross.
Even at Clarylife Global, we have a brand document that clearly communicates many of these things. And it’s important that as a brand, you have something like that.
You can’t call yourself a brand if you don’t have a corporate vision, mission, brand story, and core values. Not the ones you lifted from Google or asked ChatGPT to generate for you, but the ones that came through proper introspection, retrospection, and research. These are the things that form your brand core strategy.
You can’t call yourself a brand if you don’t have your brand messaging and positioning statement that points to the unique market you serve, the other existing players in that market, and what makes your own service different. These are the things that form your positioning strategy.
Lastly, you can’t call yourself a brand if you don’t have a clearly defined brand personality that captures the character, tone, and voice of your brand, and this aspect of brand strategy comes with a couple of guardrails (dos and don’ts) for your routine brand communications and creative expressions. These are the things that fall under the implementation strategy, and without them, there is no consistent voice or tone, and you risk PR disasters like the Bokku Mart controversy.
You only get all these things when you invest in a solid brand strategy and not just logo design, business cards, branded t-shirts, and websites, which are the only things many think of when we mention branding.
In conclusion, we need to know that a brand is an entity with a spirit, a soul, and a body. And branding is the routine work of carefully building and nurturing your brand in the hearts of people. As such, even after designing the document, there needs to be an intentional management system in place.
That’s why companies have brand managers whose job is to ensure they monitor every communication that goes out to be sure it’s in alignment with the brand strategy. And it’s not even in the title, but in the understanding of what’s at stake with that office.
I hope you learned a thing or two. Always remember, I remain your BrandCore Strategist.
