Creating a strong brand is a lot like building a house. It starts with building a solid brand foundation, or brand strategy that goes beyond the cement used. Once that is all said and done, it’s about bringing it to life cohesively and consistently across all expressions of the brand. If you are questioning whether your brand is on the right path, or if you are in the beginning stage of crafting your brand, then read below to discover the 3 elements that build a strong brand.

1. Clear Purpose

A powerful brand purpose sets out how a company intends to change the world for the better. Its role is to unite customers and culture alike in the pursuit of that intention. It's a statement of belief, of hope, of pursuit. The biggest challenge that many of our clients have isn’t coming up with great ideas, it’s articulating why those ideas should matter, to the right people.

So how do you define what purpose your brand is anchored on? Most of the time, the answers lies within. It’s about delving into your life and experience and asking yourself questions like “why do you get up from bed every morning?”. Most of the times, entrepreneurs, business owners or stakeholders jump on an idea or get excited with the possibilities of a roadmap because of what it means to them.

They connect with them on a deeper level, but identifying and articulating what makes your idea unique and relevant to the audience it serves to is often the challenge.

We at Strawberry like to look at a brand purpose statement as the idea that sits at the core of the brand, a phrase that summarises the potential of a brand. When articulated succintly, it does wonders in inspiring everyone involved!

For Garrett McNamara, the ballsy American big wave surfer looking to kickstart a new chapter in his life around sustainability, we articulated the idea statement to “spark warriors of change”.

For Bema Eats, the London-based plant-based grab & go concept, “awaken your soul, be more alive” was the statement of choice a way to pivot the brand into more than healthy and wholesome eating.

2. Compelling Story

An effective brand story is more than a narrative. It’s what people believe about you based on the signals you send. What most business owners or entrepreneurs forget is that when crafting your message, it’s important to remember that your client (regardless if it’s B2B for B2C) is a human being.

Furthermore, it’s important to remember that your brand should not position itself as the hero in your customer’s life. Instead, you should make them the heroes of your story, inspiring them to share the wonders of your product/service.

As New York Times Bestselling Author, Donald Miller, so accurately stated in his book Building a Story Brand

“All great stories are about survival — either physical, emotional, relational, or spiritual. If we position our products and services as anything but an aid in helping people survive, thrive, be accepted, find love, achieve an aspirational identity, or bond with a tribe that will defend them physically and socially, good luck selling anything to anybody”.

This was the approach we took with our client Avenidas, the passenger transport company in Portugal serving people with their personal, business and travel needs. Serving to them meant fulfilling its clients’ wildest, or sometimes, unfortunate requests — from buying and delivering flowers after a marital fight to taking a tourist’s wife to the hospital after suffering a fall in the hotel bathroom.

This pivoted into a new tagline “here for you”, where the hero in the story isn’t our client, but rather our client’s client. With the pandemic, we adapted the tagline to “here for Portugal”, creating a series of stories on instagram centred around all the things one could be doing while our client fulfilled supermarket runs for them.

3. Consistent Identity

Crafting a strong and coherent brand identity isn’t as simple as asking someone to create a logo for you. It’s important to factor in how a brand behaves and how it comes across.

Just like the famous saying “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, when we look at identity, we look at how an invisible entity is built and designed.

Having a killer logo that evokes excitement within, but then a boring website experience essentially means not thinking of the identity as a whole.

When shaping the identity of a brand, we resort most of the times to an Archetyping exercise. Not sure what it means? Keep on reading.