Filed Under: Intrinsic Branding, Leadership
By Emily Soccorsy
Vision.
Mission.
Strategic Initiatives.
Quarterly Sprints.
Key Metrics.
These are all vital parts of a healthy strategic plan. They’re also integral to a brand.
Like a nucleus is for a cell, the brand is the command center for your business. It dictates what the business does, when it grows, how it determines new offerings or refines services. It houses all the most vital information about the business.
The nucleus stores all the most critical information (brand chromosomes and genes) in a secure space, like a vault. The contents of the vault (the leader or leadership’s beliefs, aspirations, desires, painful lessons) can be accessed when needed as vital information to determine a debated course of action.
All commands to the organic system must run first through the nucleus.
All directives or initiatives to the business must first run through the brand.
Do you center your brand this way?
Before adding a strategic initiative, do you check in on what you believe, your mission as an organization, your cultural standards, your message to the world? Do you consider, deeply, the impact of whatever action you’re considering to your ideal audience?
If you answered yes, congratulations!
You’re operating like an intrinsic-based brand.
If you answered no, and were confused and intrigued, read on.
All strategic planning work is also brand work.
You can’t consider strategic initiatives without first grounding in, or level-setting around, the brand.
When clients approach us to work on brand, they are often at a crossroads. Established in their work, they have come to an intersection. They are ready to hire a new group of employees. They want to refine the workforce they have. They want to focus more deeply on their ideal client with a lot more selectivity to grow their business. They want to polish a brand that has gotten them this far but feels like it’s been fading in relevance or appeal instead of forging forward with timeless strength.
If there is a board or leadership team involved, they also want to look deeply down the road at the next three years and determine how to make steady progress toward a fixed point on the horizon they have imagined.
When we arrive to facilitate those discussions (often called strategic planning) we do so through the lens of brand first.
We begin strategic planning by ensuring the root system of your organization is intact.
Are we all clear on the mission?
Do we know what we believe in and would take action to nurture and defend?
Is our brand being lived out in the way the team treats one another every day?
How well are we serving our ideal audience?
Have we asked them lately how they feel about us?
Then we go about setting strategic priorities that are more tactical in nature. We consider strengths, past fail points, opportunities, realities of the world, realities of the industry, potentials for the future.
Once there, we can weave the brand through the strategic initiatives the brain trust of the business has determined. We can leverage the power of the brand to achieve the goals we set out.
There’s a tremendous amount of power abiding in a nucleus.
Referred to as nuclear binding energy, it secures the stuff of life (protons and neutrons, or the elements of an organization) together.
Energy of this scale literally has the power of the stars.