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Tools Brand and Messaging Strategists Use to Inform Brand Positioning


Brand positioning abstract image

Brand and messaging strategists are thinkers who dive deeply into their clients' businesses, products, or services to examine their composition, audience, and competitive landscape, and develop a plan for optimal brand positioning that drives success and aligns with their goals.

Brand and messaging strategists must rely on a diverse, expanding set of skills and approaches to meet the many brand challenges they might face in today’s marketplace. Brand strategists use several tools to develop these solutions. If you are potentially in the market for brand strategy services, it’s essential to know about the work brand strategists do and the skills and tools they use to do it.

Before examining the tools, we should consider the disciplines that brand and messaging strategists touch. Many of these are learned in contexts outside of any brand strategy training. The required disciplines include research, writing, interviewing, and project management.

Brand and messaging strategists can use a range of tools, from traditional, low-tech methods to digital, high-tech tools. Since the brand strategy field is still evolving, there is no shortage of tools available. New ones are being created every day. Even within this very general list, there are proprietary tools not mentioned.

I’ve broken these down into four categories that reflect the overarching categories describing how a brand strategist might use these tools. These categories include research and measurement, organization, communication and collaboration, and creation and presentation. There is definitely overlap, and tools can be used in more than one category.


Strategists must collect and collate a large amount of brand and market information to hone in brand positioning…


AUDIENCE RESEARCH & MEASUREMENT


Brand and messaging strategists are responsible for collecting and processing large volumes of data. These are some of the tools they might use to observe, extract, and assess information included in the messaging strategy development process.


  • Questions: Interviews, Surveys, Polls, Focus Groups

  • Observation (Ethnography)

  • Data (Primary and Secondary)

    • Demographics

    • Psychographics

    • Website Analytics

    • Social Media Metrics

ORGANIZATION

Brand and messaging strategists don’t just collect and process data. They must organize and structure the data so that conclusions can be drawn and insights formed. These are some of the tools used to organize and frame data for observation, analysis, and brand decision-making.


  • Customer Journey Maps

  • White Boards

  • Mind Maps

  • Lists

  • Mood Boards

  • Brand Matrix

  • Notebooks

  • Journals

COMMUNICATION & COLLABORATION

Brand and messaging strategists often work in teams, so they need to share information and insights efficiently and effectively. To that end, they use several traditional and digital tools to communicate the insights they have gathered and the directions they have chosen.


  • Collaborative Project/Team Management Tools (SaaS)

  • Presentation Tools

  • Storytelling

  • Creative Briefs

CREATION & PRESENTATION

Brand and messaging strategists sometimes take what they have discovered and developed, translate it into visual communication forms or frameworks that illustrate their ideas, and then use tools to create and convey concepts in ways others can use and understand.


Here are some of the tools:


  • Design Software

  • Diagrams

  • Sketchbooks & Notepads

  • Mockups

  • Slide Decks

  • Brand Guidelines


Many of these tools apply to other dimensions of the brand-building process beyond the brand strategy development phase, such as creative design and brand management. And every strategist has a system for actually implementing the strategies they devise.


If your brand needs this level of clarity, there is a direct way to get it. The Messaging Oracle™ Messaging Strategy Engine™ generates a complete messaging strategy in under 15 minutes. You provide the inputs. The engine does the strategic work.


See what happens when your message is engineered with intention.





Article written in collaboration with Reggie Holmes, Principal and Creative Director of Enthuse Creative. The original post can be found here.



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