Table of Content
“Your brand strategy is clarifying your message so customers will listen - positioning your customer as the hero and your brand as the guide who helps them win.”
- Donald Miller, “Building a Storybrand”
“Brand strategy is owning a word or position in the customer's mind. It's not what you do to a product, it's what you do to the mind of the prospect.”
- Al Ries & Jack Trout, “Positioning”
“A brand isn't what YOU say it is. It's what THEY say it is. Brand strategy is the plan to bridge the gap between business strategy and customer experience.”
- Marty Neumeier, “Brand Gap”
These are some of the most widely accepted definitions of what Brand Strategy is. So, the question becomes, what is the common thread that connects them? With some careful analysis, you will see that they are as follows:
- Focus - Your brand can’t be vague
- Differentiation - Your brand must be distinct
- Customer Perception - Your brand is in the customer’s mind
- Coherence - All actions and expressions of your brand aligns
Now that we have set some context on what brand strategy is, what then is ‘video brand strategy’?
Video brand strategy is the systematic planning of all video assets to ensure coherent expression of brand strategy across departments, demographics, and time.
A brand needs multiple video assets targeted at different demographics to achieve different goals. Let’s look at a few examples:
- Brand films:
- Goal: To make it clear - who the brand is, what the brand does, why the brand exists, and how the brand looks, feels & sounds.
- Target Demographic - Key stakeholders and future prospects
- Ad films:
- Goal - To highlight the brand’s product or service in the brand’s unique voice.
- Target Demographic - Customers
- Thought Leadership Videos:
- Goal - To position the brand leaders as industry experts.
- Target Demographic - The industry & customers
- Employer Branding Videos:
- Goal - To highlight the brand culture to attract not only the best but the right talent for the brand
- Target Demographic - Employee talent pool
- Explainer Films:
- Goal - To explain how your product or service works and enable your sales team
- Target Demographic - Potential customers
- Reels & Snippets:
- Goal - To work as a top of the funnel creative asset and build brand presence
- Target Demographic - Anyone and everyone. You need not be a customer of Nike to know about Nike
Most brands produce 20+ video assets per year across different departments. The result? Fragmented brand experience. HR's employer brand video looks nothing like Marketing's ad campaign. Your thought leadership content contradicts your brand film's tone. Each asset is good in isolation - but together they dilute your brand.
How does one reconcile these issues?
By having a strategy prior to the creation of assets that determine how they are made, the number of assets that are made and having a clear understanding of where they go and when. It also helps if the strategy is created for a timeframe such as a financial year. This helps to make sure that the final assets that are dependent on the strategy are aligned with the financial goals of the brand for that time frame aka financial year.
We must understand that in the modern age, most marketing happens through videos as a medium. It has become the norm as a result of social media. Even LLMs such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and more traditional search engines assign video assets greater weightage when searching for queries. Hence, from the point of view of even SEO optimization, video assets become more important.
Without video brand strategy, you're not building a brand - you're producing content. And content is forgettable. Strategy makes your videos compound rather than compete.
