Take a Stand for Your Brand

Every successful brand has managed to communicate its company's core beliefs and attitudes—what the company stands for—to its target customers.

Brands allow you to clearly define and communicate what you stand for, whether you're the “lowest-cost provider,” the “most innovative,” the “best total solution,” the “preferred choice” and so on.

But you've got to decide what your brand stands for, and communicate that value proposition effectively and repeatedly. It's not good enough to just run a quality business—you've got to let everyone know what sets you apart from the pack.

The Architecture of a Brand

A brand architecture lays out the key elements of the brand in detail and reveals specific messages and key takeaways for the target audience (customers and consumers). A brand architecture can include emotional benefits, functional benefits, physical benefits, product attributes, occasion appropriateness, user imagery and a variety of other intangibles.

The architecture represents the structural integrity of the brand, delineating how it is built, how it works and how the components fit together to deliver meaningful benefits to the consumer.

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Dave Sutton is cofounder of Marketing Scientists, LLC, strategic marketing advisers to small and medium-sized businesses. He is also the coauthor of Enterprise Marketing Management: The New Science of Marketing.