The Overland Agency believes an integrated brand alignment strategy starts by defining which elements of your brand create differentiation and influence customer behavior. We start with a journalistic research approach where we conduct in-depth interviews with key company stakeholders and key employees who are in direct contact with customers. In addition, we prefer a balanced mix of good customers (brand advocates), occasional customers (brand accepters), and former customers (brand rejecters).

We analyze this qualitative data to show how existing and prospective customers make choices in the marketplace, and how customers perceive the brand at each touch point. The list of touch point perceptions can be long and varied, but an important part of the process is to winnow it down to the key six to 10 brand equity elements—attributes that shift the demand curve to the advantage of the brand owner.

Certain equity elements apply to any brand, such as trust, reliability, and ease of doing business and should, as a matter of best practices, be expressed in your website through visual and verbal language as well as technology, navigation, and architecture. Other brand equity elements apply to particular brands. For example, style is an essential element of Apple’s brand equity, but not of Wal-Mart’s; technology innovation matters to Intel, but not Miller Brewing. Each equity element can have a positive or negative value, depending on whether it makes a customer more or less likely to engage in a relationship with that brand and buy their products and services. For Apple, style has a positive value to the extent that customers associate it with "the next trend of products"; it has a negative value if customers think "additional cost for no added value."

In the Strategic Planning stage we will, in addition to conducting interviews with selected stakeholders to acquire a better understanding of your organization, conduct a benchmarking study and a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis to make sure we create a unique brand strategy that clearly differentiates you in the market place.

Brand and web strategy development is a process that separates companies from their competition. Please request our white paper on brand development to learn about our four-step process for brand and web strategy development.