How can I learn how to do brand strategy?
Lindsay SaysThere is no reason for brand strategy to be shrouded in mystique — it is powerful and will make your business easier and more rewarding to lead and to market.
There are so many businesses that don’t do brand strategy simply because they find it daunting. Your knowing otherwise will be your business’s secret weapon. And on a personal level, it will supercharge your career to have this essential (but rare) tool in your toolbox.
How can you learn how to do brand strategy? I’m pleased to announce that, in collaboration with Lynda.com and LinkedIn Learning, I’ve designed a course called "Create a Brand Strategy."
Shining a Light on Brand Strategy
Most of my clients want me to create their business’s brand strategy for them. They certainly aren’t hands-off during the process, but they lack the interest, time, or ability to do the true work of brand strategy creation. So they hire me.
Yet there are also people I speak and work with who genuinely want to learn how to build brand strategy, and they ask me for resources. While I have a handful of favorite books on the topic (which I’ll list at the end of this post), the true how-to of brand strategy is not something that is well explored, even within business schools.
If this sounds familiar, then my new course is for you. You’ll get an easy-to-digest synthesis of what I’ve learned throughout years of study — academically, in my role as a brand leader at Clorox, and over the course of a decade spent developing brand strategies for my clients.
Sign up for my course if…
…you are interested in diving into brand strategy creation. I pull back the curtain on my proprietary methodology to share the steps to building a fruitful brand strategy.
The course covers:
- What brand and brand positioning are?
- The secret to a brand positioning that is both meaningful to customers and ownable to your business
- How to create a tight, honest, inspiring-but-grounded brand promise
- How to give your brand personality
- How to tailor your marketing according to your brand
- How to bring brand to everything your business does
And it’s perfect for:
- CMOs
- Leaders involved in guiding a brand
- Founders of startups
- Marketers of any level
- Strategists
- Professionals seeking to advance their marketing toolbox
Why my course instead of a book or a class?
I have fed and grown my insatiable fascination with brand strategy from several angles. I started by attending a business school with a stellar marketing program, with professors like David Aaker, Rashi Glazer, Tim Calkins, and Paul Tiffany. I learned on the job, working in brand management at Clorox – with brands including Armor All, Brita, Glad, and Clorox Bleach. I’m also self-taught, through my voracious reading about marketing and behavioral psychology (my first career goal was to become a clinical psychologist). Perhaps most of all, my brand strategy consulting business has helped me develop and refine a robust methodology.
The thing is, I love brands. I mean, I will talk for hours about brand and feel like it’s been seconds. And it’s clear there’s a craving among others, too, to learn more about brand. So I started writing my Ask Lindsay column to be of service to people in search of deeper knowledge about brand. I take a question that someone asked me via email, over coffee, or in a client meeting, and I answer it in my Ask Lindsay column.
But not even the greatest blog post can show someone how to build a brand strategy start to finish. So this year, I set out to create two vehicles to share my method in a more comprehensive way. One, I began writing a book on the what, why, and how of brand strategy. If you are interested, sign up for my newsletter to stay tuned – it should be out in late 2018 or early 2019.
And, two, I wrote and filmed this course on how to create a brand strategy.
Let the Learning Begin
So, sign up for “Create a Brand Strategy” now, look for my book next year, check out my Ask Lindsay column and sign up for my newsletter for regular jolts of information and inspiration. Enjoy your foray into demystifying the powerful tool of brand strategy.
And now, here are those book titles I promised:
- Different by Youngme Moon
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel
- Kellogg on Branding by the Marketing Faculty of The Kellogg School of Management
- Building Strong Brands by David Aaker
- Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
- Pour Your Heart Into It by Howard Shultz
- Wired to Care by Dev Patnaik
- What Great Brands Do by Denise Lee Yohn
- Invisible Influence by Jonah Berger
- Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
- Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout