This is a slightly longer article than the others in this series. It’ll take a couple of minutes to read, but it’ll take longer if you also read the guides (linked to in this article) that give more detail about each step. But this is career-changingly important, and we’re not going to pretend that it’s simpler than it really is.

A company’s brand is incredibly important. It sums up the company’s reputation. It’s what customers have a relationship with. A good, strong, desirable brand gives a company massive competitive advantage and reliable loyalty from its customers.

So the role of Brand Director (or Head of Brand, or Brand Manager) is crucial for the company’s success. A good Brand Director can make a company thrive. A poor one can destroy it.

We’ve pulled together seven actions that are crucial for ensuring that your brand shines, and that you are the most respected and admired Brand Director that your company has ever known.

None of these steps is simple. You know better than to expect quick fixes or shortcuts at your level. But if you make sure that you, or your team, do each one of these steps, then you can be confident that your brand team will be among the top teams in the country.

And nobody expects you to complete this on your own. We’re here to help you with each of these steps.

Let’s go.

Step 1: Know where you are right now: research your current brand

Your brand isn’t what you say it is. Nor is it what your CEO says it is, or your brand agency.

It’s what your target audience thinks it is. If their opinion of your brand doesn’t match your view of the brand, then they’re right and you’re wrong.

So it’s vital that you find out what people think about your brand. There’s a guide to show you what research you need, how frequently you should get it, and how to make sure that your market research team gives you exactly what you need here.

As well as finding out what your target audience thinks about your brand, you should also find out what your company actually stands for, and what its values are. There’s a list of questions that you should seek answers to in our guide to writing a brand strategy, here. Which leads us on to step 2.

Step 2: Write a brand strategy, to show how you will turn your brand into a fantastic and valuable asset that delivers huge success for the company

Your CEO will want to know how you’re planning to establish the brand as the leader in its sector. Your Marketing Director will need to have clear guidance about the brand to inform their marketing strategy.

This is where you reassure them how you’ll deliver all this. As with all strategies, it should answer three questions – where we are now, where we want to be, and how we will get there – plus an action plan to show when all this will happen.

There’s a guide to writing a brand strategy here.

Step 3: Create a stunning brand proposition that delivers real loyalty and emotional engagement with your customers

Part of the output from your brand strategy will be to create a strong and engaging brand proposition.

Many companies have weak propositions based on vacuous and generic values that sound ok, but which aren’t distinctive and aren’t true: “We deliver the highest quality service at the lowest prices”, “Our values are quality, customer service and passion”, that sort of thing.

A good brand proposition should meet four criteria. It should be distinctive, so that it sets you apart from the competition. It should be attractive, so that your customers actively want to be associated with you. It should be credible and true, because there’s nothing worse than a company (or a person) pretending to be something that they’re not. And it should be consistent: everything that the company does should reinforce the brand, as we discuss in the next step.

There’s a guide to developing a killer brand proposition here.

Step 4: Conduct a customer journey audit, to make sure that everything that your company does reinforces the brand.

The best proposition, backed up with the most expensive brand advertising campaign, can be undermined in an instant by a poor customer experience from an unexpected area. When you were planning that advertising campaign, did you know about the wording on that standard letter that is being sent out to some of your customers every month, which implies that they don’t pay their bills on time?

The best way to uncover, and to resolve, any horrors like that is to conduct a full audit of the customer journey, paying special attention to the often-ignored moments of truth that are where your customers experience the brand most intimately.

There’s a guide to conducting a customer journey audit here.

Step 5: Deliver a staff training programme to make sure that everyone in the company understands what the brand stands for, and how their behaviour can reinforce the brand

The best way to prevent these problems happening in the first place is to make sure that everyone in your company understands what the brand stands for, and what they need to do to make sure that their role reinforces the brand.

All too often, the brand is regarded as something that the flower-arrangers in the Marketing team manage, which is nothing to do with the rest of the company.

But you know that every employee in every department will play a part in shaping the experience of doing business with your organisation. So it’s vital that all of them have the opportunity to hear what the brand stands for, and to understand the impact that their role has on the brand.

Step 6: Implement a strong brand communications plan across all channels

Most advertising is directly related to selling a product or a service.

Brand advertising has different objectives. It is arguably more important than product advertising, because a strong brand makes product advertising campaigns easier and more effective.

You should aim to develop a communications campaign that emphasises what your company stands for, and its values.

As well as traditional advertising, make sure that your campaign includes consistent messages spread across PR, sponsorship, social media, packaging and events.

There’s a guide to crafting a great brand communications campaign here.

Step 7: Continually monitor the brand’s performance and that of your competition with regular research

And so we come full circle. Step 1 recommended a research programme to understand where you are now. Nothing stays the same for long, and you’ll want to monitor the success of your brand development activity.

So you should make sure that you get regular updates on the performance of the brand, so that you’ll be able to provide snappy and up-to-date answers to any requests from the CEO or your other colleagues in the board meeting when they ask about the health of the brand.

The guide that we linked to in step 1, above, shows you what this regular research should include, and how frequently you should demand it.

And finally, the sales pitch

No Brand Director is expected to deliver all of this on their own. In any case, many of these tasks require the impartiality of a fresh view from outside the company. We offer help with all of this, backed up by many years of experience of doing the job that you’ve taken on responsibility for. Please get in touch, and we’ll have a chat about how we can make you shine.