Business writers often say that branding is about representing an ideal vision of what could be, while people reflect the reality of what is. The brands we choose are the expression of our aspirations, helping us achieve our desires and goals. Attitude, self-confidence, and success — these are qualities people love to see in their favorite brands and, by extension, in themselves as well.
So, how can you make such an impact? The right brand strategy can help you create a persona that resonates with your target audience. As such, we asked our experts to provide successful brand strategy examples to guide you.
Table of Contents
What Is a Brand Strategy?
A brand strategy is a well-rounded plan that outlines a brand’s goals and long-term vision. It serves as a blueprint that lays down the foundation of how a brand will differentiate itself from the competition and build a relationship with its audience.
A comprehensive brand strategy includes everything from brand values, personality, and mission to visual identity and voice. It encompasses the brand’s most marketable and representable characteristics, guiding all marketing efforts, customer experience, and communication. This ensures that every touchpoint with customers and partners aligns with the company’s objectives and brand identity.
Essential Brand Strategy Elements
A memorable brand is more than just a name, logo, and tagline. A strategic, functioning brand has several key elements, including:
- Brand identity: This is the visual representation of your brand. A cohesive harmony of shapes, colors, a logo, and a tagline that also embodies the message and attitude of your brand.
- Brand purpose: What is the reason behind your brand’s existence? Beyond profit, some entrepreneurs create brands to offer more sustainable products and advanced and safer services or to establish new industry standards with revolutionary technology.
- Brand vision: What is your brand’s long-term plan? For example, a brand vision might be to decrease the carbon footprint of an entire industry.
- Brand mission: What kind of commitment will your brand make to reach its vision? The mission outlines the actions you’ll take to reach your vision.
- Brand values: How will your brand achieve its vision? What are the core values that outline what your brand stands for and guide its operation?
- Brand positioning: What kind of reputation do you want for your brand? Positioning involves shaping how your brand meets the needs and wants of your audience.
- Brand personality: Adopting a human persona is also pivotal for a brand’s success. People do business with people and are drawn to human characteristics. If their values and traits align with your brand’s personality, it’s easier for you to build customer loyalty.
- Brand voice: This is how your brand communicates its message to your audience. An extension of personality, brand voice also communicates brand characteristics, which helps you differentiate your business from others.
- Brand storytelling: People love a good story, and brand stories are no exception. Storytelling is a powerful way of transferring a message and should serve as the core of branded communications.
4 Benefits of a Brand Strategy
Having a strategic approach ensures you leverage every possible advantage to create a brand that grabs the attention and resonates with your target audience.
- Brings clarity to your brand
- Ensures consistency
- Boosts customer loyalty
- Offers a competitive advantage
1. Brings Clarity to Your Brand
Having a great concept for a brand is only the starting point. Without a well-rounded strategy, things can quickly get out of control and even the clearest guidelines can get altered or blurred. A strategy ensures that everyone’s on the same page and helps build a unified brand image with clear objectives and identity.
2. Ensures Consistency
Having a strategic approach ensures that your brand’s image, persona, and voice remain consistent across all marketing channels and communications. This helps you build your reputation and trust with your customers and helps maintain it in the long run. Data suggests that consistent branding can lead to a 23% revenue increase when done right.
3. Boosts Customer Loyalty
Customers who love your products and resonate with your brand’s personality and values often become brand advocates. A strategy can help you add more depth to these emotional connections and personalize your interactions with them.
4. Offers a Competitive Advantage
A well-defined and unique strategy helps you position yourself in the market and stand out from the myriads of brands that enter the market every day. Having a strategic approach to your persona, voice, and image helps you communicate why you are the best choice for your audience.
12 Brand Strategy Examples To Inspire You
There are several approaches brands can use to define their core strategic philosophy. Explore how these strategies are applied in the best brand examples below:
- Differentiation branding
- Product branding
- New audience targeting
- Brand extension
- The no-brand approach
- Crowdsourcing
- Name identification
- Attitude branding
- Online branding
- Individual branding
- Private label branding
- Service branding
1. Differentiation Branding
Differentiation branding involves making your brand more desirable and unique than similar brands within the same industry. This philosophy requires you to create a unique offer that only your brand can provide, whether through superior quality products, services, or experiences.
Whole Foods is a great example of differentiation branding. The supermarket chain created a unique blend of consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketing, storytelling, content marketing, and digital experiences to show why shoppers choose their diverse, healthy, and wholesome foods. Unlike many grocery stores that focus on a quick, get-in-and-get-out approach, Whole Foods offers a more thoughtful shopping environment while being a national grocery chain.
2. Product Branding
Product branding revolves around making a single product easily identifiable. Graphics, logos, and branded symbols are all pivotal branding elements in helping consumers instantly recognize these products. Coca-Cola, Nike, Apple, and McDonald's are all prime examples of brands with instantly recognizable products.
Juan Carlos Parada, Founder of Loop Design, points out that some of these brands have also managed to go beyond product recognition and started adapting their strategies to different markets with immense success.
“McDonald's initially sold American fast food-inspired items, but as the brand expanded, it also adapted its marketing and menu for various markets. In India, they’ve even introduced localized and vegetarian options, successfully penetrating the Indian market”.
3. New Audience Targeting
New audience targeting is a common branding strategy that involves creating campaigns that change a brand’s image to appeal to new audiences that the company didn’t target before.
Kristin Marquet, Founder of Marquet Media, highlighted Netflix as a good example. Netflix not only targeted new audiences but also shifted its entire business model. Through this, the brand successfully entered international markets and changed the entire entertainment industry in the process.
“Netflix was a DVD rental service originally but transitioned to a streaming service and made it an international force. The company heavily invested in local content production and also catered to diverse audiences, tailoring its offering to local preferences and tastes. This led Netflix to become one of the largest streaming platforms across the globe.”
4. Brand Extension
Brand extension happens when a company uses its name recognition to launch new products or enter new industries that are different from its primary lineup or niche.
Puneet Shakuja, Creative Director at Tequila, highlights how both Tesla and Apple have managed to enter and conquer new markets.
“Brands like Apple and Tesla have masterfully redefined their strategies to enter new markets. Apple expanded into the wearables market with the Apple Watch, leveraging its existing ecosystem to create a seamless user experience. Tesla, on the other hand, ventured into energy solutions, complementing its automotive innovations with solar products and energy storage solutions. Both brands utilized their core strengths and innovative approaches to successfully tap into new market segments”.
5. The No-Brand Approach
The No-Brand approach focuses on developing and marketing generic products or services instead of establishing a traditional brand identity. Generic products can appeal to buyers because they can get decent quality products at lower prices.
Take Thomann, a European music store, as an example. The brand offers in-house-built electric instruments, amplification, and effects under the Harley Benton name. The equipment has been praised for its solid build and sound quality for incredibly low prices.
6. Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing heavily relies on collecting ideas and feedback from consumers. Brands can use this strategy for various purposes, such as brand planning, product development, and more.
Jakob Arshakyan, Business Development Manager at Onyx8, points out LEGO as a great example of crowdsourcing.
“Many big brands involve customers to improve satisfaction. Take Lego, for example. They invite customers to submit their designs for new LEGO sets through the LEGO Ideas platform. Or we advise big companies to use AI and machine learning to analyze customer feedback from various sources such as social media, customer service interactions, and their surveys. This can help them to make data-driven decisions and improve branding.”
7. Name Identification
Some brands rely solely on their reputation when introducing new products. In these cases, consumers can often identify the brand simply by their logo, color scheme, or slogan.
Ferrari is a great example of name identification branding. The brand’s racing heritage, exclusivity, extraordinary performance, and exemplary customer service have all become synonymous with the prancing horse logo. Whenever people see a Ferrari, they immediately identify the cars with these characteristics.
8. Attitude Branding
Attitude branding focuses on creating an image that evokes particular emotions in your target audience. This provides the company with a distinct personality and values that appeal to customers.
Francesca Broggi, CEO and Owner of Ayana Consulting Sàrl, says that brands with eco-conscious values are all great examples of attitude branding, as they convey powerful and forward-thinking values that resonate with modern consumers.
“The outdoor clothing brand, Patagonia, integrates sustainability by using recycled materials and promoting fair labor practices. They also donate a portion of their profits to environmental causes. Through its Sustainable Living Plan, Unilever aims to reduce its environmental footprint and increase its positive social impact. This includes sourcing raw materials sustainably and improving health and well-being for billions. Lastly, IKEA focuses on sustainability by using renewable and recycled materials in its products and aiming for energy efficiency in its operations."
9. Online Branding
Internet branding is what most companies have integrated into their marketing approach. They position themselves as active participants in the digital landscape, utilizing websites, social channels, online stores, blogs, and more to connect with their audience.
Juliana Piper, Owner and Lead Designer at PiperMache Website Studio LLC, points out that having a digital presence requires thoroughly researching target audiences, and catering to their digital preferences.
"Embracing a holistic branding strategy is highly appealing to the public. In the TikTok era, people want to see the real individuals behind the brand. Authenticity and transparency have become key elements in building trust and connection with your audience. By showcasing the faces, stories, and values of your team, you create a more relatable and engaging brand narrative.”
According to her, such an approach can greatly improve how people perceive your brand’s personality as well.
“Leveraging social media platforms to share behind-the-scenes content, personal anecdotes, and day-to-day operations can humanize your brand and foster a deeper sense of community. This approach not only differentiates your brand in a crowded market but also encourages user-generated content and word-of-mouth promotion. In essence, a holistic branding strategy that highlights the human aspect of your business can lead to increased loyalty, higher engagement, and ultimately, greater success."
Inha Tolochenko, Marketing Manager at Obriy Design Büro, tells DesignRush that a vigilant online presence can also lead to great opportunities where brands can demonstrate their core beliefs, customer care, and values. She cites The North Face as a prime example.
"I was recently impressed by The North Face's approach to customer service. The brand claims their jackets are waterproof, but when one girl’s jacket got wet during a hike, she shared her experience in a TikTok video that went viral. A brand representative saw the video and sent her a new jacket. Whether this was a genuine response or a clever marketing move, people appreciated it because it demonstrated the brand’s commitment to product quality and customer satisfaction.
10. Individual Branding
Individual branding involves creating separate branding for each service or product offered by a single company. This can prove especially useful for large corporations with diverse products that target different audiences or have different characteristics.
Procter & Gamble is a company that uses individual branding for its products. For instance, they own several grooming and beauty products that are all individual brands, such as Max Factor, Gilette, Head & Shoulders, Pantene, Oral-B, Old Spice, and so on.
11. Private Label Branding
In Private Label Branding, retailers contract third-party manufacturers to produce products that are then branded with the retailer’s logo. This way, stores can have their own product lines to compete with other brand names they sell. This allows them to keep prices low, as private-label merchandising enables them to earn a higher percentage.
A good example of this is Aldi’s Simply Nature products.
12. Service Branding
Service branding markets a product by highlighting the additional services the brand offers. Companies using this strategy often offer exclusive client services to enhance the product’s appeal.
A good example would be this short interview with Jay Leno, as he talks about McLaren’s and Porsche’s dealer services and explains why he refuses to buy a Ferrari.
3 Real-Life Brand Strategy Examples
We talked about the philosophies that serve as the basis for winning brand strategies. Now, let’s look at a few more real-life brands that have successfully established a strong presence in their industries:
1. Nike
Nike is a globally recognized brand with a logo and tagline that nearly everyone knows. As a leading brand in sportswear and footwear, Nike excels in delivering extensive marketing messages and advertisements. Its strong attitude branding (“Just Do It”) has become synonymous with sport, endurance, and perseverance.
Nike’s active attitude is also matched by its brand values, which focus on athletics and innovation.
2. GoPro
GoPro cameras are widely used gadgets, particularly by stuntmen, vloggers, athletes, and travelers. What makes GoPro’s strategy exceptional is its smart usage of user-generated content.
The brand also launched its free video editing program that attaches its branding elements into user-generated clips and shares this content on social media. This approach encourages other users to create and share their own videos, leading to a snowball effect. It’s a simple, yet brilliant and fun strategy that involves everyone in the community, fostering a community of brand advocates.
3. Coca-Cola
The Coca-Cola Company is a branding success story. The brand's strategy has been so effective that it enabled it to build a community around its products. Coca-Cola's Chrsitmas ads are so successful and memorable that some even ask whether the company invented Santa Claus.
The secret of Coca-Cola’s success goes beyond holiday advertising. The brand’s strategy includes offering a myriad of branded merchandise such as hats, sweatshirts, backpacks, and other gadgets people use every day.
Brand Strategy Examples: Final Thoughts
Branding will always play a crucial role in a company’s success. However, it’s not the only thing an organization needs to focus on if it wants to prosper. Companies should also focus on perfecting their products and services, ensuring they live up to the “branded” claims and user expectations.
Even the best branding strategy can fall short if the company offers nothing other than a great story, a catchy tagline, and stunning visuals. This is why companies need to focus on creating a synergy between brand and product: to achieve their goals and truly offer value to their customers. To wrap things up, the best way to do this is by working with a specialized branding agency.
Brand Strategy Examples FAQs
1. Can you create a branding strategy alone?
Yes, you can create a branding strategy on your own, but it’s always better to work with a branding agency that has both the specialized knowledge and experience to bring the most out of your idea and business.
2. Is sustainability a trend?
No, sustainability is not merely a trend. It is a brand value that’s increasingly becoming the standard practice across industries and in every area of human life as our resources are limited.
3. Are a logo, name, and tagline enough for a brand?
No, a logo, name, and tagline are just components of a brand. A complete brand identity needs a distinct voice, tone, and visual identity including typography, color schemes, and more.
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