What is a brand? A brand is much more than a logo or a slogan; at a strategic level, a brand expresses the relationship between an organization and its users. This relationship is measured by all the interactions between the organization and the users. These interactions include a spectrum of “touch points” such as:

• The product or service itself — the ingredients, price, packaging, features, benefits and quality;
• The messages and materials across all media that describe the organization as well as its products and benefits;
• Employees, partners and advocates, not only those who represent the brand externally but also those who support it internally;
• The facilities, systems, processes, technologies and programs that help to deliver the product or service;
• The metrics that measure and reflect the organization’s efforts, such as financial performance, operational data, external reputation and corporate culture;
• The satisfaction, morale and fulfillment of all stakeholders, not only customers and employees but also suppliers, partners, investors, media and advocates.

Brand strategy is the effort to build and maintain a positive brand relationship between organization and user, and therefore maximize the brand’s value in the marketplace.

Five key elements of the brand strategy are the promise, the identity, the portfolio, the message and the experience. These elements, individually and together, are defined, designed, delivered and evaluated in a four-phase cycle. Unsurprisingly, the role of the brand manager is to oversee both the elements and the cycle.

There are many ways to measure the success of a brand. The brand manager's colleagues might measure success through their functional prisms:

• The marketing team looks at market share.
• The CFO values EBITDA.
• The sales team measures revenue.
• The COO analyzes order fill rates or some other six-sigma metric.

The brand manager's challenge is unique because in addition to understanding all of the above data, he or she must also monitor and evaluate the brand strategy, in particular the efficacy of the organization's brand promise and the satisfaction from the user's brand experience.

If the organization's brand promise aligns to the user's brand experience, the brand succeeds. Conversely, if the brand promise is broken, the brand will ultimately fail.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Some portions of John Phillips' Brand Strategy - Consumer Products and Services were previously published - Copyright John Phillips 2013.