Brand Objectives

Brand Audits and Brand Objectives

One of the major challenges for me in branding is determining what the content of declared brand objectives should be. I focused most of my research on this topic because brand objectives encompass a lot of the details of a person or an organization’s branding. Still, I came across additional, interesting approaches to branding that are tangentially related to my main research question about objectives that I detail here.

• Brand audits are detailed analyses of brands in their current state (DeMers, 2014). In some ways, we conducted a brand audit by looking at A Wish With Wings and their needs. In a brand audit, you do the following:
  • Determine which qualities of your brand are effective and which ones are not in order to restructure your identity and messaging goals to produce better results
  • In other words, giving your brand a makeover
  • Examine current branding:
    • The standards of your brand image and voice
    • The demographics of your target audience
    • The mission and strategic objectives of your company
    • The strategies you use to reach your goals
  • From this definition of a brand audit, it seems that conducting one simultaneously with strategic planning would be useful for a company or a person looking to re-brand themselves.

• Debina Dey writes about brand awareness, a concept that I tried to weave into the brand objectives that I worked on this week. She lists the following in her “Three Objectives of Brand Awareness” article as essential to branding (2014):
  • Build customer awareness
  • Promote the website
  • Add value
• The last tip, adding value, was the one that I found most useful in approaching branding. The first two are somewhat a given when branding a company or individual.

• I learned a new acronym for an approach to social media marketing, that I think is important to consider when branding. The acronym is G’SOT, or Goals, Strategies, Objectives, and Tactics, and it has more to do with strategic planning than branding, but is helpful in writing a brand objective and considering all parts to it as well (Belicove, 2013).

References (APA)

Belicove, Mikal E. (27 September 2013). Understanding goals, strategy, objectives and tactics in the age of social. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikalbelicove/2013/09/27/understanding-goals-strategies-objectives-and-tactics-in-the-age-of-social/#309367154c79

Dey, Debina. (19 August 2014). Three objectives of brand awareness. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140819050533-78938514-three-objectives-of-brand-awareness

DeMers, Jayson. (21 November 2014). Why you need a brand audit (and how to perform one). Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jayson-demers/why-you-need-a-brand-audi_b_6195428.html