During slower business periods, audit every customer-facing brand touchpoint, not just marketing assets. This includes truck wraps, staff uniforms, on-hold music, and email signatures. This is the ideal time to identify brand inconsistencies and create an actionable plan for fixes when your team has more capacity.
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To ensure their new brand strategy was practical, Ford required every department to articulate how they would activate it. This exercise revealed gaps and ensured the strategy would guide daily decisions on what to do and, crucially, what to stop doing.
Most businesses mistakenly focus their marketing strategy solely on growth (lead generation). A complete strategy must also encompass brand strategy (messaging, positioning) and customer experience strategy (retention, referrals) to create a sustainable system.
Before scaling paid acquisition, invest in a robust brand system. A well-defined brand DNA (art direction, voice, tone) is not a vanity project; it's the necessary infrastructure to efficiently generate the thousands of cohesive creative assets required to test and scale performance marketing campaigns successfully.
To avoid an inconsistent, 'all over the place' approach, companies must establish a common brand-building philosophy or framework. This shared point of view, like Molson Coors's MUSCLE framework, ensures organizational alignment and helps build a cohesive marketing culture.
For brands with high Q4 revenue concentration, Hexclad's founder advises against a short-term mindset. He views the work done in Q1-Q3—building brand and earning trust—as "planting seeds" that are only realized during the Q4 "harvest," respecting the long customer consideration period.
Repositioning Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) from a purely financial ROI calculation to a measure of consumer response and brand health can secure broader organizational buy-in, especially from brand-focused teams.
Your on-hold message is a captive-audience branding moment. Replace generic elevator music or a list of offers with something that reinforces your brand identity. Using your company's jingle or a personal thank-you message from the owner can turn a moment of friction into a positive brand touchpoint.
Before scaling, meticulously script the ideal customer experience in a "Concept Essence" document. This guide details aesthetics, food attitude, and human interactions, ensuring every location consistently performs the intended brand experience, much like a theater production following a shared script.
To ensure brand is a shared responsibility, Ally includes brand health KPIs on the scorecards of the CEO, CFO, and other business leaders. This elevates brand from a marketing concern to a core business objective, fostering cross-functional alignment and accountability.
To build an authentic brand, move beyond product features and engage in an introspective process. By answering these three core questions, a company can establish its foundational ethos. This 'universal truth' then serves as a guiding principle for all external communication and strategic decisions.