CMOs have the following challenges:

1. Cash: Where to spend the marketing dollars?
2. Consistency: How to make sure everyone is on the same page?
3. Clutter: How to compete in a crowded market?

These are known as the 3Cs.

Luckily there's a helper to fix the 3Cs.

It's called Brand Strategy.

Touchpoints: Customer Interactions with a Brand

A touchpoint is any interaction that a customer has with a brand.

For example, these are my touchpoints with Apple 👇

As a brand, it is important to understand that the customer can experience your service or product through all their senses and experiences.

Understand it and be deliberate how you design and plan for these touchpoints.

Brand Strategy: Direction, Directive, Development

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. - Mike Tyson

Brand Strategy is frequently synonymous with a Marketing Plan.

Marketing Plans are boring and rarely get updated.

This is a problem if circumstances are constantly changing:

• Customer Behavior
• Competition
• Economic Environment
• Cultural Context
• ...

Static documents in a dynamic world. Not good.

A good Brand Strategy does the following:

• Direction: Identifies a long-term objective
• Directive: Gives instruction on how to achieve long-term objective
• Development: Updates based on new data

Bottomline: Build and Maintain Your Brand With Intent

Brand Strategy helps to consistently deliver great touchpoints and as a result, tackle the 3Cs:

1. Cash: Know how to prioritize your efforts.
2. Consistency: Deliver great customer experiences across all touchpoints.
3. Clutter: Adapt and benefit from market dynamics.

🗺️

This post is an excerpt from my online course Fundamentals of Brand Strategy where you learn how to build successful brands.

The self-paced online course contains 5 hours of video material and teaches you how to use the Brand Pyramid.

You can hit me up on twitter. DMs are open.

Further Reading

• Touchpoint (Wikipedia)
• 20 Customer Touchpoints That Will Optimize Your Customer Journey (HubSpot)
• How people decide what to buy lies in the “messy middle” of the purchase journey (Think with Google)

Short Excerpts from the Course

These posts are short snippets of the course curriculum 👇

• A Pragmatic Look at Branding: What Is a Brand?
• Touchpoints and Brand Strategy: How do We Build Associations?
• Positioning and Differentiation: How to Stand Out as a Brand?
• Brand Vision: What Is the World That Could Be?
• Brand Purpose: Why Bother?
• Brand Promise: How to Communicate in One Statement?
• Mission Statement: How Do You Do It?
• Brand Attributes: How Does the Brand Present Itself?
• Frame of Reference: Where Is the Brand Placed?
• Target Customer: Who Is Your Audience?
• Customer Need: What Is Their Real Job-to-be-Done?
• Value Proposition: What Are You Offering?
• Reasons-to-Believe: What Are Your Proof Points?