We start with the brand first. We have to internally set up the brand before we externally communicate the brand to the market. Most well-known brands begin with this brand stage which is called the brand foundation. Why we have to start with the brand foundation? As a long experience in the communication field, we have found out that if we don’t have a proper fundamental for the brand, your communication will go with no direction, and reflect on wasting your time and budget. A clear brand foundation helps marketers to define core values of their brand delivered through their products and services and to their customers.

What are the elements of the brand foundation?

1. HERITAGE – we have to know the legacy of our brand, its originality, what is its real passion.

2. COMPETENCY – no brand can be good at everything; you have to analyze and define what are the outstanding skills of your brand. Please specify it sharply with no bias.

3. DIFFERENTIATION – every time you think about the differences, you should consider what is your distinction compared with your competitors all the time. It’s not only comparing with your direct competitors, but you should also study your indirect competitors.

4. CUSTOMER – who is your real customer, how many segments? Also, what are their particular shared insights? There is no only one group of customers for a brand anymore. One brand can have so many segments; Apple, there are various segments of the customers who are kids, teenagers, first jobbers, families, and adults. However, these customer segments share something in common, which are a seamless technology, easy to use and reflect on their status, for example.

5. PERSONALITY – the personality works well with the customer. When you define who is your right customer, you need to consider your brand personality. Your brand has to behave relevantly with your defined customers.

6. CORE VALUE – this is the emotion part for the brand foundation, core value or some companies may call it ‘brand belief’. If you want your customers to understand what your brand believes in, it is a crucial stage to identify it with care. It will be a frame of thought to make your customers perceive your brand as your desire.

All six elements are the essential elements of the brand foundation. As mentioned, it is necessary to put your brand in the right direction before communication. Once you finish your brand foundation, now it is a time to communicate to your customers. The next step is to monitor and checks your brand that they are still on track regularly.

Enjoy setting up your brand foundation!

Branding is about to understand the customer and get them to see your brand as a problem-solver. 

While developing a strategic marketing plan, the most important thing that we should do is to understand the needs and wants of prospects and customers. From the experience of doing strategic planning, a half or three out of four of our time will spend on researching, defining, and analysing what problems and needs of customers are. Don’t quickly jump into the ‘job-to-be-done’ checklists if you do not analyse your customer’s needs thoroughly. The suggestion is to spend time as much as you can in this stage to understand your customers and find out their pain point. However, remember that your brand cannot solve all pain points, select some areas that your brand can perform well, bring your brand grow in the long run.

There are essential ways that help to guide you when you want your brand being a good problem-solver. Ask yourself with these questions.

1. NECESSARY – Is your brand necessary for them? In what way that helps to eliminate their pain?

2. PROMPTNESS – Is your brand always there when they have a problem? Is your brand servicing under 24/7 concept, or limited area to service, or less consumer touchpoints, for example? Do you find ways for them to reach your brand instantly?

3. POSITIVE MINDSET – Is your brand positively solving the problem or solving beyond their expectation with high quality? (Not just from duty)

4. CONNECTIVITY – How does your brand create a chance to connect emotionally with your prospects and customers? Connectivity makes you know more about their pain so that you can bring your brand engages with them quickly.

When you see the above questions, you quickly know to do a marketing they are not different from you live in real life the same as you do and behave this with your family’s members, your friends, your clients, or even your loved ones.

Easy, right?

Understanding + Solving = Brand Building

Sharing resources with other brands offer an opportunity to make our brand have more leads and brand exposure. There are many Thai brands use this strategy to promote their brands or activities in the market; the famous comedy talk show – Note Udom collaborates with Singto the ukulele singer to share their work through a music video. That makes both of their target markets feeling enjoyable with the song and video. The success is a vast online video sharing.

There is a question of what we should consider if we would like to use Collaborative Marketing to promote our brand.

First of all, we must understand what Collaborative Marketing is all about before putting this strategy into a marketing plan.

Here is its short definition.

“Collaborative Marketing is the process of aligning or connecting our brand with other like-minded brands.”

How do we find a like-minded brands? It can explain easily with this example, if our brand talks to a green-conscious customer, we need to find like-minded brands that value the same mindset.

What can our brand be aligned? There are various ways that our brand can be aligned; we can align our target market with them, resources, interests, activities, platforms, services, locations, contents, products, for example.

Importantly, please keep in mind that always create a new thing to excite the market when collaborate!

Back to many years ago, when we talked about direct marketing, we also heard another term of it; one to one marketing, personalized marketing, database marketing, customer relationship marketing or CRM and today we are familiar with a new name ‘Big Data’ which relates to analyze more, learn and know more your customers. However, whatever it is called, I still prefer to call it as ‘CRM’.

Why? The relationship has an in-depth meaning;

it means you have to learn your customers slightly and regularly in order to have tighten relationship with your customers, and you should know about their behaviour and attitude from the big data that they give you through touchpoints that the brand communicates or interacts with them. It just does not learn their thoughts towards your brand, but also their thought towards your competitors, markets and trends. So, the real CRM is about a process, a customer research, and a sales tool, not only about privileges or any relationship programs given offers to existing customers.

CRM is a ‘PROCESS’, a company wants to use CRM to be a part of marketing strategy.

That company needs to think about the strategy before any further steps. The CRM strategic plan should compile; ‘lead generation strategy’; how to acquire the prospect into your database and how your data look like, including how to manage cold, warm, or hot prospects and turn them to be customers, ‘sales strategy’; how to get the sales from those acquired prospects, what are triggers to make them to purchase or use products and services more often or regularly. Thinking about how to cross-selling and up-selling on this stage, data mining is so important to get you to respond to what your customers need, lastly, retention strategy, the plan that needs to capture the customer’s heart, show your customers that you are good at knowing their life, including their special occasions, times, lifestyles or interests.

CRM strategy should come first before finding the technology, creating any communications, executing any CRM programs. Creating a CRM Blueprint is essential, and strongly recommend doing so. Try to avoid or jump into the program without having an exact strategy. Importantly, learn more about your customers and think about their whole journey, and then design the relationship strategy between your brand and them.