That brand strategy, marketing strategy and business strategy must necessarily go hand in hand in a successful business is a statement that is difficult to refute. There is no better business strategy than a powerful brand that generates trust and helps sell our product or service by adequately communicating its value.
Only if your business model is based on high volumes and price negotiation could branding be irrelevant, although even in this case this is not always true. For the rest of us, who face fierce competition, we have a “copyable” product/service no matter how much we invest in innovation, and we do not want or can be the cheapest. Having a strong brand is the key to selling more and suffering less along the way.
It can be a matter of life or death, in fact. “Either you are indonesia phone number data different or you are cheap” as Guy Kawasaki would say.
Let's start at the beginning. What is a brand?
A brand is an association of meanings -created- in the mind of the consumer that generates preference towards our product or service.
To summarise, the brand makes our client have a higher perception of the value of our product or service compared to that of the competition because they trust in the differential experience that it promises, which has been communicated appropriately and which is sustained because there is product truth behind it.
Brands work by creating neural connections in our minds similar to those we use to learn and make decisions. Just as we know that something burns because we have experienced it, we associate Volvo with safety or Apple with innovation because we have created this brain shortcut in a similar way. That is how we function (it is a matter of survival, it would be impossible to evaluate every time we have to make a decision, no matter how small, can you imagine?).