Brand strategy is business strategy - lecture notes

Guest lecture by Yash Khatri · Strategic Brand Management · Dr. Moonje Institute of Management, Nashik

These notes cover the tools from today’s session. You’ll need most of them for the assignment, so keep this page open while you work.

1. The basics

Nobody compares every option before buying, and you don’t either. We use shortcuts - familiarity, reputation, price, trust, convenience and how a brand makes us feel. A brand is one of those shortcuts. It tells you what to expect before you’ve tried anything.

Five words people mix up -

• Product - what you sell. Features, performance, service, price and where you can buy it.
• Brand identity - what the company wants you to think of it.
• Brand image - what you actually think of it.
• Reputation - the verdict people reach over years.
• Brand experience - every interaction, before, during and after the purchase.

A company gets to design its identity. It doesn’t get to decide its image.

Every touchpoint builds the brand or chips away at it. The product, the app, the store, the packaging, delivery, support, returns, ads, reviews, what your friends say and how the staff behave when something goes wrong. The ad is only one of these, and usually not the one people remember.

Brand equity is what the name is worth. Five parts -

• Awareness - do people know you exist, and can they recall you unprompted?
• Associations - what pops into their head when they hear the name?
• Perceived quality - do they trust you to deliver?
• Loyalty - do they come back, recommend you or refuse to switch?
• Business payoff - can the name earn a better price, shelf space or cheaper customers?

Popular and valuable aren’t the same thing.

2. Positioning

Positioning is choosing the place you want in a specific person’s head, compared to the other options they have. Every positioning has to answer four questions -

1. Who - whose decision are you trying to win?
2. What they need - which problem or want actually matters to them?
3. Why you - what should they link to you and not to the other guy?
4. Proof - what makes them believe it?

If your positioning fits every competitor too then it isn’t positioning.

Write it in one sentence -

For [target audience], [brand] is the [category] that [distinctive benefit], because [reason to believe].

Here’s a weak one - “For everyone, our institute is the best because we give quality education.” No real audience, nothing different and no proof. Skip words like “best” and “quality” unless you can back them up. And remember, this sentence is for your team. It isn’t a tagline for a billboard.

Good positioning means saying no. A premium brand can’t suddenly start fighting on price. A value brand has to stay cheap without feeling cheap. A specialist gives up mass appeal to matter more to fewer people. If the promise changes every campaign then people stop knowing what you stand for.

Different brands win for different reasons. My read of four you know - Apple wins on design, everything working together and a bit of status. boAt is affordable, loud, young and built online first. DMart runs on everyday low prices and very tight operations. Maggi is quick, familiar and tied to a habit. These are interpretations, not facts, and proper research could prove me wrong.

3. Making the promise real

A promise is only worth something when the business delivers it. Check every part of the brand marketing programme -

• Product - does it deliver what you promised?
• Price - does the price say the right thing about you?
• Place - can your customer actually find and buy it?
• Promotion - do your messages set the right expectations?
• People and process - do your staff and systems back the promise up?

No ad campaign can cover for a bad experience for long.

Digital-first brands. Online, you can reach, test and build a community much faster. But attention isn’t trust. A viral post can get you reach without a single repeat customer. Watch what happens after the click.

Retail and private labels. In retail, the store itself is the brand. A private label is the store’s own brand, and it borrows the store’s trust. One bad product hurts the whole store.

4. Measuring it

A KPI is only useful if it tracks a goal and helps you make a decision. Pick the KPI that fits the goal -

• Awareness - aided and unaided recall, branded search, reach in your target group.
• Consideration - shortlist mentions, product-page visits, enquiries, trial intent.
• Preference - choice share, win and loss reasons, conversion against rivals.
• Experience - CSAT, NPS with context, complaints, review themes, resolution time.
• Loyalty - repeat purchase, retention, churn, referrals, share of wallet.
• Business payoff - price premium, margin, cost to win a customer, revenue mix.

What the short forms mean -

• CSAT - did you like it, usually out of 5.
• NPS - would you recommend us, out of 10.
• Churn - the share of customers who stopped buying.
• Share of wallet - of everything they spend in this category, how much comes to you.
• Aided and unaided recall - aided means they recognise your name from a list. Unaided means they say it with no list at all.

Where measurement usually goes wrong -

• Treating followers, impressions and views as brand equity.
• Tracking awareness without checking if the right people are aware.
• Treating NPS as the full story on loyalty.
• Reporting a number with no baseline, target, time period or comparison.
• Crediting a campaign for a result that something else caused.

If nobody changes a decision because of a KPI then why are you tracking it?

5. The Apple case

Keep three things apart - what Apple says, what it delivers and what customers actually value. People pay for design, ease of use, reliability, privacy and a bit of status, and different buyers want different things.

The ecosystem cuts both ways. Devices that work together make life easier and make the next product an easy sell. But a closed system frustrates people, and a premium promise means every failure gets noticed. The real question is whether the ecosystem helps the customer or just locks them in.

Brand extensions work when the new thing shares the brand’s associations, skills or customers. A bad fit waters the brand down.

Practise with the questions from class -

1. What are Apple’s strongest brand associations?
2. Which customers value Apple most, and why?
3. What actually justifies the premium price?
4. Where could the ecosystem turn into a reputation problem?
5. Should Apple enter a new category if the fit is weak?

How to answer - make a claim, back it with evidence, name the trade-off and say what you’d measure.

6. What’s changing

• Reputation moves fast now. You can’t control the conversation, but you can control how you respond. Stick to facts, own the mistake and say when you’ll update next. Deleting criticism doesn’t fix anything.
• Purpose and sustainability claims need proof. Ask what changed, how it’s measured, who checks it and what’s still unsolved.
• AI makes a team faster. It won’t make the positioning call for you, and a human has to check anything that matters.
• Co-branding, rebranding and extensions each fix a different problem. The test for all three - does this give customers clearer value, or just a week of buzz?

7. Before you submit, run this check

1. Who exactly are we trying to win over?
2. What do they need, value, fear or want to become?
3. What should they remember us for, compared to everyone else?
4. What does the business have to do to prove the promise?
5. Which numbers will tell us if it’s working?

Missing even one answer? Then your strategy isn’t done yet.

A brand is a promise. Strategy picks the one you keep.

Go to the assignment brief →