The Relationship Between Strategic Planning and Brand Strategy

Nearly every strategic plan we review has at least one goal related to building your organization’s brand.

The way we see it, building your brand is a goal that that allows all your other goals to flourish, so it makes sense that the completion of a new strategic plan leads into brand strategy.? But even if your plan doesn’t list brand as a goal, it’s an important consideration if you want to see your plan succeed.

Brand is a Road Map

When you change your strategic plan you are shifting your goals. If you’re not, what’s the point in a new plan? And when you make a change in the destination, you need to change? direction – the path you take to get there.

Brand is like a guide for your marketing and fundraising. It’s what connects your new goals to your marketing efforts. If you don’t re-point your marketing to your new north star goals, then you risk running along two parallel tracks that never meet up.

A brand strategy creates internal and external language that explains what you do and why you exist. It identifies and prioritizes your audiences so that messaging connects with the people you need in order to thrive.

When you know all that, you can design a communications strategy that focuses on reaching your goals rather than just executing tasks.?

Strategy VS Tactics

These words seem really different but can be surprisingly confusing. Understanding the distinction will help you evaluate the value of your activities and choose wisely.

A 2013 article in Forbes explains strategy as the approach you take to achieve a goal and a tactic as a tool you use in pursuing the objective associated with a strategy.

It’s the most straightforward definition I’ve seen, but it’s still hard to spot in the wild. Is “video” a strategy or a tactic??

Without taking the time to consider the goal, the audience and the objective of creating video it’s really easy to create a lot of social-feed-filling content that looks like a lot was achieved but does nothing to deliver on organizational strategy.

Brand strategy goes bigger and creates a set of master decisions to check against when planning everything from programs to events to marketing. With that as a guide, it’s easier to trace a line back to strategic goals when choosing tactics.

Brand is Strategy

Decisions to work on brand often arise out of strategic planning or when a new leader comes in. These are both times of organizational change, yet most times branding is looked at as a marketing project.

Marketers understand this connection and can see how aligning brand will help the organization. They are the right choice to be project leaders in the process.

But logo design is a marketing project. Brand strategy is a leadership project. Buy-in and participation from the people setting direction is the single biggest predictor of a successful outcome.

And successful means making progress on achieving organizational goals.

Is Brand on your Plan?

If branding came up as a goal or a need on your strategic plan you may be wondering how to move forward.

Going through our 10-question brand readiness assessment can help you evaluate your organization‘s capacity to take on the project you need.

The best way to start is to explore what brand means to you so you can find the right path forward. Please don’t hesitate to reach out so we can help you consider options.