Don’t worry, I’ve come back to finish our series on the 5 essentials of an integrated brand. New Year’s resolution for 2008–blog more!

Your company’s business strategy is the roadmap for your organization. It tells people what the priorities are, where the focus is, what you want to achieve. If your brand is the promise you keep as an organization, then that promise needs to be built into your roadmap. Strategic planning processes look different from company to company, but there are a few guidelines you can follow regardless of your process:

1) Visualize your destination: what would it look like if you reached your business goals while keeping your brand promise? Get your management team involved in describing it so they can all agree on where they are headed.
2) Create strategies that get you to your business goals while keeping your brand promise: There may be hundreds of ways to achieve your business goals, but that field is more limited if you can only choose those which deliver your brand promise. This helps you flavor what can be generic business strategies with your unique approach (your brand).
3) Apply your brand as a filter for your entire strategic plan: Is this us? If we achieve these goals will our brand be stronger? Does anything in this plan compromise our brand promise? Are there strategies we need to add specifically to strengthen our brand?

One of our clients, Group Health, is in the middle of a long-range strategic planning process. They started the work by identifying a destination (their vision) that is congruent with their brand promise, of innovation for better health. And throughout the strategic planning process, they’ve worked to achieve their vision in a way that is congruent with their brand promise by inviting leaders and staff to continually ask “what’s next for our customer’s health?”

By using the brand as their filter with each strategy, Group Health is much more likely to keep their brand promise when it’s time to execute the strategic plan. This process also helps limit staff confusion. Every employee delivers the brand every day, in part, by executing the strategic plan. It’s like a call and response.

–Briana Marrah

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