Brand work, whether in the form of a brand refresh or extending your brand into new products, culture initiatives, or product innovation, takes time and budget. Going into the new year with budget planning, you can invest in brand activities incrementally rather than undertaking a large brand refresh all at once and add to the ability of your brand to create a multiplier for your value over time.
Brand creates value in 3 ways
The value of brand to a company can be articulated in three broad categories:
- Resonant brand, building affinity and differentiation
Brand can create value by clearly articulating a purpose and the intended positioning in the market. It should be internalized and used by every leader and employee to make decisions and guide behavior, as well as set the tone for expression and communication of the brand for a consistent customer experience. We call this having a resonant brand strategy.
A resonant brand strategy makes a brand feel relevant and relatable, even urgent and important, to prospects and customers, creating cultural velocity, efficiency in the purchase funnel, loyalty or repeat purchase, and word of mouth growth. Resonance lifts a brand out of commodity.
To be resonant, you have to know why you exist, how you’re different, and why it benefits or matters to customers. Then you need to organize and message in a way that meets customers and prospects where they are. Work done on your brand purpose, positioning, value propositions, messaging, architecture and portfolio strategy, and customer journey all help to increase your resonance.
- Distinctive assets, building recognition and memorability
First, brand can create value through distinctive assets that makes your brand memorable and unique in the category. The ampersand for J&J, the color red for Coca-Cola, “We bring good things to life.” for GE, the owl for Duolingo, or the smile for Amazon. Having distinctive assets means that your brand will stand out to people new to the category and you’ll be remembered by all when it comes time to purchase.
To maximize this value for the business, you need to have 3-5 distinctive brand assets. Distinct assets are empirically linked to increasing share, growing new customers, and directly influencing the purchase decision at the time of purchase.
But it doesn’t require a refresh. You can evaluate your brand assets and see where incremental change or an evolution or net new creation of a visual or verbal asset can increase the distinctiveness of your brand. This can be done across visual and verbal branding such as your naming, logo, personality, design systems, tagline, and campaigns, as well as at the level of your overall brand narrative.
- Brand Integrity, or the ultimate in efficiency
The ultimate expression of a brand having business impact is Brand Integrity. Brand Integrity means following through on your purpose and brand strategy in everything you say and do.
An organization is most effective, highly efficient, and drives the highest value long-term when its purpose and its actions are aligned – when what you do matches what you say, a brand can change the trajectory of business.
This can be directed through your vision and values, behaviors, and through employee training and enculturation. When everyone knows how to make decisions and is working from the same internal motivation and intention, decisions get made faster with fewer layers, innovations happen faster and tend to stick in the market better, and employees are better retained and more likely to promote the company as a great place to work for others.
A decision guide to determine where you'll get the most bang for your buck.
So how do you decide where to invest your money first? We’ve developed a scorecard so that you can ask yourself a set of questions that will help you begin to determine where your brand opportunity lies. Download the scorecard below. It covers the three categories we’ve explained above.
Your answers can point you to the right places to make incremental investment in 2025 to get more value out of your brand by helping you to prioritize your brand needs as they relate to your 2025 business objectives. Based on your budget and your brand priorities, invest in any one or more of these areas to keep your brand up to date and make headway toward a valuable brand.
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