Defining Brand Strength: 7 Factors to Enhance Your Branding
Every year, global branding consultancy Interbrand releases its list of “Best Global Brands” as a benchmark for the industry and brand value. For decades, Interbrand has been at the forefront of defining what makes a brand strong, reliable, and valuable.
Their factors of brand strength can be applied by big global tech conglomerates all the way down to the mom-and-pop shop on the corner, so that all brands work toward becoming resilient and impactful in today’s landscape.
With seven internal and external brand expression factors, Interbrand has provided a guide for defining and enhancing overall brand strength.
Let’s get into how they do it and how you can, too.
What are Internal Brand Factors?
When we talk about internal brand factors, we’re talking about the elements within your organization that shape the foundation of your brand. These could be found in everything from your brand strategy to your organizational process and policies and procedures.
Internal brand factors are typically under your control and involve active work around alignment and implementation. Despite being internal, they set the stage for how your brand is perceived externally.
Brand Direction
Direction refers to the clarity of purpose and ambition behind your brand. More than a mission statement, this factor evaluates how clear your sense of direction is as a brand. Direction may also manifest as well-defined goals and a clear strategy for achieving them over time.
Apple is an excellent example of a brand whose direction has remained the same and set a clear path for its work from inception: a relentless focus on innovation and design.
How to Improve Your Direction
When did you last revisit your brand’s mission and vision statements? Are they aligned with your business targets and practices? If not, which needs to be adjusted? Once you’ve aligned the two, set new, measurable objectives and define the roadmap for achieving them.
Brand Alignment
Alignment is a bit more abstract. It’s all about ensuring that everyone in every department and every role in your organization is moving in the same direction. Your brand is like a rowboat; if everyone is using oars differently and has a different direction, that boat is going nowhere.
Nike’s internal alignment around equipping everyday and professional athletes to be their best has guided their product development and brand messaging to remain consistent and powerful since day one.
How to Improve Your Alignment
If you have a larger organization, consider where you can implement cross-functional team meetings or workshops. If you’re a smaller shop, consider shadowing days where different team members shadow one another to gain insight into daily activities. Collect feedback to identify areas where you can increase commitment to your brand’s strategy and goals and create systems to help execute that strategy.
Brand Empathy
Empathy is exactly what you think it is. It’s about being in tune with your customers and stakeholders. When brand empathy is high, you’re able to actively listen to evolving needs and respond appropriately and swiftly.
It’s also likely the most underrated internal factor because it involves turning eyes and ears away from the brand as a concept and toward the brand as a concept fulfilled.
How to Improve Your Alignment
Establish some type of feedback loop with your customers or clients through surveys, social media, and direct interactions. Actively solicit information from them that helps you stay connected to their needs and expectations.
Brand Agility
Another brand factor that is exactly what it sounds like. Agility is your brand’s ability to adapt quickly to market changes, seize opportunities, and overcome roadblocks with speed and efficiency.
Netflix exhibited brand agility perfectly when it switched from DVD rentals to streaming, leaving its competitors in the dust while defining a new category altogether.
How to Improve Your Agility
Look into your business process and service or product development to see where you can encourage a culture of innovation and rapid prototyping. Take some time every quarter to analyze industry shifts and be prepared to pivot as needed.
What are the External Brand Factors?
While internal brand factors set the stage for brand perception, external factors help shape and define perception through interaction with the outside world. This helps uncover how brands stay engaged and relevant with their customers and audience in a constantly changing market.
Interbrand has split external brand factors into two categories: Engagement and Relevance.
Engagement defines how the brand connects emotionally and psychologically with its audience. Relevance is all about how the brand fits into the lives of its customers by meeting their needs and remaining vital to them.
Engagement
Brand Distinctiveness
Distinctiveness is the place most brands think they need to start. It’s all about the unique assets, visuals, and experiences that make your brand recognizable and memorable in the market. This can be everything from customer service to packaging, websites, social media, and so much more.
Coca-Cola is likely the most distinctive brand in play today. Its iconic red script logo, distinctive bottle shape, advertising style, and market saturation make it instantly recognizable worldwide.
How to Improve Your Distinctiveness
We’ll die on the hill of brand consistency. Wherever you are in the brand development process, it's critical that you are focused on creating and consistently using visual and verbal brand elements that set your brand apart from competitors.
Brand Coherence
Coherence is the direct result of consistency. Coherence is all about crafting the same on-brand narrative and experience across all channels and touchpoints. Coherence doesn’t disregard nuance. Consider it like the bumpers or rails while bowling. The bowling ball (read: your brand) is still heading to the pins, no matter how you throw it.
Disney is the master of brand coherence across countless touchpoints. From theme parks to movies to merchandise, everything they do is focused on a unified story of magic and imagination.
How to Improve Your Coherence
When did you last cross-check your materials against a brand style guide? When did you last update your style guide to reflect your (re)defined internal brand factors? Use a style guide as a source of truth for creating consistency across your brand experience.
Brand Participation
Participation is all about how your brand draws in customers and partners to engage actively. It’s where you focus on fostering a sense of community and collaboration within your brand beyond the transactional relationship.
LEGO has made an entire model of this with its LEGO Ideas co-creation platform, where fans and enthusiasts contribute ideas and designs to ideas.lego.com and are featured alongside other customers.
How to Improve Your Participation
You might not have the literal building blocks LEGO does, but you do have options. Consider interactive campaigns to encourage user-generated content (UGC) and then feature it broadly. You can also launch social media challenges or contests as long as they stay relevant to your brand strategy.
Relevance
Brand Presence
Presence is the degree to which your brand is top-of-mind for customers when they have a need in your category. You might think of Coca-Cola when it’s hot outside and need to feel refreshed. When you consider outdoor gear, Patagonia is top-of-mind.
This brand factor is all about memorability and recall in the market, and it is challenging for new category brands or upstarts in an already saturated category. It’s more than market dominance; it’s reputation.
How to Improve Your Presence
Consider advertisements with a focused retargeting method. Frequency is a great way to build brand memorability, a through line to Presence. Stay active with your communication strategy to keep your existing audience engaged even when they’re not purchasing from you.
Brand Trust
Trust is the extent to which your brand is seen as reliable and acting with integrity while meeting (or, ideally, exceeding) customer expectations. In recent years, trust in airlines has become center stage, with Delta leading the charge at a high level with its employee-focused brand commitments and at a lower level with its baggage claim timing guarantee.
How to Improve Your Trust
Transparency and consistency lay the path to trust. When your business practices, motivations, and changes are made clear and transparent to your customers, trust is built. When you consistently deliver on your brand promise, trust grows.
Brand Affinity
Affinity is the emotional connection that your customers feel toward your brand and is generally based on shared values and benefits of your brand matching your customers' needs. Affinity is built slowly and strategically over time. Chewy has the corner market on affinity not just because they take care of our furry friends but also because of the way they have put actions behind sentiments by reimbursing unopened food and sending a card and flowers when a pet passes away.
How to Improve Affinity
Aligning your brand with interest-based causes or values that resonate deeply with your target audience can be highly effective for this factor as long as it is done authentically and not based on trends or social commentary.
What can you do today to build a stronger brand?
Building a stronger brand starts by identifying the top opportunities for improving your brand factors. The best way to begin? Revisit your brand strategy and ensure it’s aligned with your internal capabilities and external market realities.
When in doubt, follow the basics:
Refining your visual identity and messaging.
Engage with your customers through interactive and meaningful experiences.
Stay relevant by being attuned to customer needs and market trends.
Consistently deliver value that resonates with your audience.
Implement small, strategic changes that can greatly impact how your brand is perceived and experienced. Remember, a strong brand is not built overnight—it’s the result of consistent effort, reflection, and adaptation.
Build a Stronger Brand
If you need some guidance, support, or a brand audit to help you begin, we’re here to help.
