By M. Isi Eromosele

Your brand has to have a positioning strategy and everything you do with regard to that brand must communicate it.

Brands are the most critical value-producing asset for your business enterprise and they are the only true source of preference and differentiation for your business from your competition.

As such, the starting point for the new paradigm enterprise marketing management is to develop a deep understanding of your target customers and architect your brands to secure strategic market positions that will drive sustained profitability for your business.

Every brand that’s ever had great success has managed to communicate its company’s core beliefs and attitudes - what the company stands for to its target customers. Architect your brand to do the same for you.

Brands allow you to clearly define and communicate what you stand for, whether you’re the lowest-cost provider, the most innovative, the best total solution or the preferred choice. You've got to decide what your brand stands for and communicate that value proposition effectively and repeatedly.

Additionally, you need to maintain constant control over the perception of your brand, because if you don’t, your competition will. The brand should help customers navigate their way to your business even in the face of competing enticements.

Under ideal circumstances, brand perception can even help bring your customers back again and again to your door without them even considering your competitors. Keeping a tight rein on your message ensures that your competition doesn’t siphon off your customers.

Just as you can’t stand still and let the competition over-whelm you, you also can’t spread yourself too thin and be all things to all consumers. You cannot have a productive, profitable relationship with your customers unless you bring clarity to what you stand for.

This applies to both your target customers and every other player in your competitive set. Your brand is the focal point, the repository for both the intrinsic and the extrinsic benefits associated with your offerings.

The Architecture Of A Brand

Like a human being, a brand has individual values, physical features, personality, and character. Like a story, a brand has characters, setting, and a plot. Like a friend, a brand offers a personal relationship with customers, one that, in the best-case scenario evolves as they do.

Building brands, like marketing itself, is a science, not an art.

A brand architecture, comparable to the architecture for a building, lays out the key elements of your brand in detail and reveals specific messages and important take-aways for the target audience.

A brand architecture can include emotional benefits, functional benefits, physical benefits, product attributes, occasion appropriateness, user imagery, and a variety of other intangibles.

The brand architecture represents the structural integrity of your brand, delineating how it is built, how it works, and how the components fit together to deliver meaningful benefits to the consumer.

A brand architecture, grounded in the science of understanding why customers purchase and use products, provides direction about which combination of specific emotional and functional benefits can generate the greatest amount of customer purchase intent.

Once completed, a brand architecture produces a strategic marketing framework visible to the entire organization. You can then use this framework to begin communicating and delivering these benefits to your customers.

Key Components Of A Brand Architecture

The key components of a brand architecture are its foundational attributes (or product features), functional benefits, and emotional benefits. You can determine the structure of a brand architecture by focusing on the key purchase intent drivers - the attributes or benefits that influence customers’ overall decisions to purchase or use a product.

Purchase intent drivers are often intangible qualities. Marketers can measure these drivers by determining how much a given emotional benefit, functional benefit or brand attribute drives a customer’s desire to purchase a brand in ascertain competitive frame.

The most compelling purchase intent drivers often reflect underlying emotional benefits associated with the competitive frame and the brand. Differentiation purchase intent drivers are the benefits that begin to positively separate you from the rest of the

competition. These are capabilities or equities that you possess that others in the competitive set may not.

Preference drivers are benefits that can propel a brand to category leadership. These benefits are crucial in the minds of customers as they consider various brand alternatives in your competitive set.

These types of benefits represent significant points of leverage with customers and can become the source of sustainable advantages.