Whiplash Team, 14th October 2022
Strategic branding, a tool to manage brand purpose
In our previous post we talked about the soul of organisations, which is nothing other than their purpose. But what links the soul of the organisation with its most tangible elements? How does it connect to consumers’ experience and brand perception? Can it be managed? The answer to all these questions can be found in strategic branding.
Making the intangibles of an organisation operational requires a discipline specialised in identifying its main principles and adding value to them for the user, through a specific way of managing its tangible assets.
In this context, the brand becomes the link that ties the tangible and intangible aspects of the company. Strategic branding, on the other hand, is the tool we use for the analysis of what, how, why and because the brand exits.
Through strategic branding all these concepts are transferred to people, products, presentations, and market presence. The four areas through which the brand becomes operational and project toward users.
Although brand management is often confused with a purely aesthetic exercise, in fact, it involves everything we do to translate, coherently and consistently, the deep sense of mission of the organisation. Thus, integrating it into the business strategy and connecting it with the consumers’ experience.
Branding therefore acquires a multidimensional character, which in addition to being strategic is also anthropological, cultural, sociological and historical.
A strategic tool
Therefore, to connect the organisation’s purpose to the user’s perception of the brand, we must analyse the company’s what, how, why and because from the four perspectives that Christopher Smith points out in his article Branding et Ánima: cosmic, contextual, historical and prophetic.
This analysis will allow us to build a universal discourse that serves as a “metaphysical description of the organisation”, in addition to placing it in a social context. All these will help keep its original raison d’etrê alive, giving it a moral compass for projecting it into the future.
From this perspective, strategic branding goes far beyond the definition of communicational technique in which it has been restricted. It becomes a strategic management tool that allows the organisation’s purpose to become operational in the four areas already mentioned and where the brand becomes visible.
Thus, by identifying the intangible constants that derive from the organisation’s foundational elements and by articulating them through proper brand management, projecting them in everything it does and says and in how it does it and says it, the organisation will generate in the consumer a consistent and tangible perception of the brand.
