Lean Branding

Chapter 5. Brand Strategy

It’s showtime. You’ll be happy to know that we haven’t been spending the last few chapters creating a story and symbols only to keep them to ourselves. Ready to hit the marketplace? Chapter 5 is all about reaching out, engaging, and converting. Ears and eyes, hearts and minds, and—yes—wallets.

Brand communications are not about explain-time, justify-time, defend-time...blah-time. Please remember to keep the idea of showtime close to heart.

The tools you will see throughout this chapter—videos, images, web content, review systems, and partnerships, among others—are all geared toward showing what your brand has to offer. Every time you sit down to think about how you’ll communicate, please ask yourself one question:

Am I showing or telling?

The idea of “showing, not telling” will constantly save you and your brand, and I will show you how throughout this chapter. (I will show, see?)

Here’s the thing with strategies: they might work like a charm for some brands and do nothing for others. It’s important for you to keep in mind that you may have to tweak the recipe ingredients I will be introducing. How do you go about tweaking, you ask? Chapter 7 will help us determine whether and how each of these ingredients is working for your brand.

At the beginning of Part II, I introduced the Lean Branding recipe with a list of 25 components that we would build in the following chapters. It is now time to learn how to build the ingredients for your brand communications strategy. ...