Branding for the Public Sector: Creating, Building and Managing Brands People Will Value

Chapter 4 Building a Power Public Sector Brand: Visions, Values, Emotions and Personalities

This chapter analyses and gives examples of the critical steps that have to be worked through in order to create a strong public sector brand strategy with examples from both public and private sectors. Included in brand strategy are the concepts of brand visions, brand identity, brand image, brand personality, and brand positioning, including the segmentation of target audiences. The role of market research is important and helps make the process more accurate by discovering where the brand is in terms of target audience perceptions and where it could be more advantageously changed. The techniques we refer to in building a brand strategy are those successfully used by the private sector, and that are now enthusiastically pursued by the public sector. The principles of branding are the same whatever the nature of the brand to be built and managed.

I will give a short introductory explanation of these steps before moving on to describe them in more depth with examples and cases. This chapter will focus in detail on the first two steps of developing a brand vision and personality, and Chapter 5 will explain the third step, which is developing a brand positioning.

The three main steps in building a powerful brand strategy

There are three main steps in building a brand strategy, namely the creation of:

1. An emotionally-based brand vision – this is a long-term and high-level statement (which ...