80
MAKE IT MATTER
The difference between a brand strategy and a communications strategy For some organisations, brand strategies and communications strategies are effectively the same thing, and their communication strategies talk about raising awareness and not much else. However, this approach is too limiting as it underplays the role of communications, which has a lot of other things to do besides building brand awareness. Our advice is to make your communications strategy work harder than just waving a flag and making yourself famous. Think first about the impact your communications will have and give something of real value to your audiences. Do that and they will grow to love you all on their own. So let’s draw a distinction between brand and communications strategies. Here, we’re working with the following definitions: Brand strategy is an articulation of your organisation’s positioning and personality, and how it expresses its values. It explains what’s unique about your organisation and how people benefit from engaging with you. Your brand strategy probably won’t include much detail on how you are actually going to get out into the world and engage people. It’s a more conceptual framework that guides your communications strategy and should ideally guide other strategies, for fundraising, HR, policy work, and so on. Communications strategy tells you who your organisation wants to communicate with, how and why. It’s likely to include an objective to strengthen or refocus your brand, but some of your communications may have little or nothing to do with achieving brand goals at all. For example, you might choose to partner with other organisations to gain influence on a certain issue, operating under a campaign banner with limited brand presence for the individual organisations. In this situation your brand has a very limited role. Other parts of your communication strategy may help build your brand, but have other specific aims. For example, a communication objective to persuade people to leave their car and walk to work will primarily be about achieving behaviour-change goals. If your brand is behind the campaign, it might make it more effective. Conversely, the campaign may strengthen your brand, but in this situation the brand goals are secondary and you will measure success by the number of people walking to work.