Got a product that you’d love to shout about from the mountaintops, but you’re just not sure if anyone will hear you? Well, that’s where brand strategy comes in. Creating a path to market is a step-by-step journey. The formula for winning lies in leveraging brand strategy so your product can stand out from the competition in an overly crowded meat case.
In my role as a brand strategist here at Midan, I continually partner with our meat industry clients to develop go-to-market strategies. However, we’re not just carving slices of success for these businesses. Rather, we’re using the power of brand strategy to elevate their go-to-market plan.
How do we accomplish this? To start, it’s crucial to understand that a brand is way more than a name and a logo, and that brand strategy serves as a foundational building block of any successful product. However, “brand strategy” can at times be an overused, or even vague, term. It can also get tossed to the side, or ignored, by company leaders that do not fully understand its impact on market dominance.
Let’s explore why this matters: Brand strategy is a road map to a company’s success in the marketplace. As marketing guru Simon Sinek clearly articulated: “Vision is a destination – a fixed point to which we focus all effort. Strategy is a route – an adaptable path to get us where we want to go.” Data shows admired and loved brands generate greater financial success.1 According to The Economist, brands account for more than 30% of the stock market value of companies in the S&P 500 index. Furthermore, successful brands can command a higher premium and better weather inflationary periods. According to investor Warren Buffett, “The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business.”
During inflationary times like the one we find ourselves in, innovation plays a bigger role than ever, and therefore our clients’ need for effective go-to-market plans becomes more important than ever. We make brand strategy our blueprint using these key components:
Convert Insights Into Action
Knowledge is power. In my strategy role, I work closely with our Customer Insights Team to conduct primary research, evaluate secondary research and mine data to identify key marketplace opportunities for clients. What could this mean? Knowing how to interpret particular data points, for example, enables us to identify trends like growing consumer reliance on convenience products. In turn, this could translate to a client recommendation for more value-added products in their meat case assortment.
Optimize and Connect to the Ideal Target Audience
Our world is changing rapidly – and meat consumers are evolving right along with it. Midan pioneered the first meat consumer segmentation research in 2016, making continuous updates and recently launching Meat Consumer Segmentation 3.0, which revealed five new meat consumer segments. As part of a client’s go-to-market evaluation, we use insights from this groundbreaking data to dig further into consumers’ perceptions, attitudes and behaviors toward meat and poultry. For example, understanding the meat shopping patterns by segment helps identify an optimal distribution scenario for our client’s target audience.
Establish Your Right to Win
Differentiating from the competition is crucial to success. We carefully define brand purpose, brand beliefs, brand character and brand essence to carve out authentic and relevant white space for a brand. We pride ourselves on identifying that “white space” where your product can uniquely fulfill unmet consumer needs.
Develop and Deploy a Winning Brand Positioning and Story
Here, we connect the dots based on unique insights we’ve found along the way. We clearly articulate the challenge, shed new light on the problem, assert the key brand advantage and link it all back to the target audience in the most compelling way possible. We use brand positioning as a tool to ensure your target audience sees you as the best solution to their specific needs. The result? A bullet-proof brand story rooted in consumer research and specific to your brand, connecting with your target in both a rational and an emotional way.
Drive Marketing Efficiency
Last, but not least, a brand strategy sets the stage for the development of the Marketing Plan: Every marketing component, and every consumer touchpoint, must align with the overall brand framework, therefore making your marketing efforts impactful and cost-effective. Think of brand strategy as the springboard for your entire team, ensuring marketing and related efforts are aligned across the board.
Hear Molly’s insights on how brand strategy shapes business success
For some real-world examples of Midan’s brand strategy in action, check out our work here.
