Imagine you’re a project manager responsible for launching a new product to the market. You have a schedule, budget, and a team ready to go. However, over time you notice that different departments within the company are not communicating effectively. The marketing department promotes the product in a way that doesn’t quite reflect its true capabilities, while the sales department focuses on different aspects than those highlighted in the advertisements.
As a result, customers receive mixed signals, and the product’s sales do not meet expectations. You start to wonder if anyone in the company knows what’s really going on.
This scenario highlights a common problem: the Telephone game between the four areas of business strategy, product development, promotion, and branding.
If you manage any of these areas, you’ve likely faced the challenge of effectively integrating them. How do you ensure that your business strategy supports your product, your product aligns with your brand, and your promotions reinforce everything in a cohesive manner?
Business, Product, Brand, Promotion: What Languages Do They Speak?
We’re ripping off the band-aid – there isn’t one single pattern that works for all, as demonstrated by the recent much-publicized case of Nike (link 1, link 2) where a transformation model successful for other companies didn’t work at all (link). Nevertheless, it is possible.
To tackle this complex task, we’ve compiled the most popular dashboards from the four areas mentioned earlier. Upon closer inspection, you’ll notice that many of the fields across these canvases are quite similar or identical. On our website, you can download all of them (link) in an editable version, plus even more.
It’s understandable that different departments and individuals in a company will focus on various metrics and goals, but a common set of these dashboards allows you to easily diagnose discrepancies and define the strongest aspects of your offering.
Working with these templates is an endless, often chaotic cycle, so it’s important to think of them as complementary elements rather than a closed, linear process.
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1. Business: Strategy, Economics, and Profit
Hambrick Diamond isn’t very popular in the marketing circles, but I highly value it for its straightforward presentation of complex issues. It helps you outline your overall business strategy and understand the economic logic behind your choices.
Questions for your business:
- Do you know how you want to grow?
- How do your strategic choices support your overall business goals?
2. Brand: Essence, Values, Identity, and Differentiation
Brand Ladder appears in various forms. Its premise is to organize the most important information about the brand from the foundations to the roof – similar to the well-known Maslow’s pyramid. It helps understand and express the benefits your brand offers, from functional benefits to emotional connections with customers.
Questions for your brand:
- What is the foundation of your brand?
- How does your brand want to create an emotional connection with customers?
- What tension does your brand generate and how does it resolve it?
Product: Vision, Market Fit, Key Features, Meeting Customer Needs
Product Market Fit Board: Product-Market Fit and Customer Needs
Product Market Fit Board focuses on a different aspect than the previously mentioned vision. Its goal is to demonstrate or verify that your product meets the market and customer needs. In line with the idea, “don’t look for customers for your product, create a product that customers are looking for.”
Questions for your product:
- How well does your product meet market needs?
- Is there room in the market for your product?
Promotion: Marketing Campaigns, Narratives, Communication, and Channels
Campaign Ideation. A promotional campaign or communication platform is something that usually comes at the end, when the business strategy, product, and brand are already defined. Therefore, if you or your advertising agency are struggling with a good campaign idea, it usually means that they are not precisely defined. Ideation Canvas is a tool for coherently expressing the concept and direction of creating a promotional campaign that tells the story of your brand and engages customers.
Questions for your promotion:
- What will be the main narrative of your campaign?
- Is its message consistent with the product and brand?
- Will it help achieve business goals?
Summary – we usually talk about the same thing, but often in different ways
We’ve covered popular canvases that describe business strategy, product development, promotion, and brand: Hambrick Diamond, Lean Canvas, Brand Ladder, Brand Canvas, Product Vision Board, Product Market Fit Board, and Campaign Ideation Canvas.
In larger organizations, separate teams work on them, which for a long time have been shaping their slang and processes. In smaller ones, their “complementation” falls to very different departments/persons (according to the non-falsifiable principle that everyone knows marketing, and best of all the husband/wife of the owner).
Regardless of the size of the organization, their compilation and comparison allows you to focus on:
a. mutual connections
b. where we understand each other and where we diverge
Consider, based on the selected templates, what is your organization’s approach to business, product, promotion, and brand. On our website, you can download all of them (link) in an editable version, plus even more. Is there consistency between all these areas? Ensuring that each aspect of your business supports the others is key to creating a strong, integral brand and driving long-term success.
Regularly reviewing and improving your strategies using the simple models described here allows you to maintain consistency and coherence throughout the business. This continuous effort will help you build a brand that resonates with customers and stands out in the market.
If the questions described here keep you awake at night – write to me, let’s talk.
Thanks for reading!
Want to get those editable templates right now? Write: jan@wedesign.pl