How you get to your final destination is just as important as the final destination itself—because without proper attention towards the method of arrival, you’ll never get to where you want to be. Aligning your brand strategy with your business strategy is absolutely essential to your success. But how do we determine the best way? Well, that’s where brand strategy comes into play.

Remember your brand is essentially your company’s personality. It’s not what you think or feel about your business—it’s what your users think or feel about your business. Your brand is what makes your users choose your products or services over your competitors. So the way to determine the best means to get to your destination is to determine the best way to reach your customers. And that is demonstrated in how you brand.

I’ve talked to many who have a good idea of where they want to go, but instead of using this to craft an effective roadmap, they take off assuming they’ll make decisions on the fly and land in a good place. They develop a website, design a logo, or craft a marketing plan without even a thought towards who their target market is, how best to reach that market, and how to effectively spend time, money, and resources.

Without carefully crafted roadmaps, destinations (visions) are nothing more than pipe dreams. A roadmap is your strategy for success, and neglecting to define this strategy can only make your destination harder to reach.

Don’t Spin Your Wheels

A lack of a carefully constructed roadmap is the foundation for many frustrations. Maybe you can relate. Maybe you’ve experienced a lack of growth, or created a website on the fly that never generated new leads, or perhaps the 5,000 postcards you printed for a local trade show are still in the back closet collecting dust. I like to refer to these actions as the business equivalent of spinning your wheels. More often than not, spinning your wheels is not for a lack of desire, a lack of effort, or a lack of motivation. It’s usually for a lack of planning.

Without a properly defined strategy, you’ll spin your wheels, and when you finally get traction, there’s a good chance you’ll head in the wrong direction. If you don’t focus on aligning your brand strategy with your business strategy you are setting yourself up for a lot of frustration, a lot of wasted time and resources, and potentially a lot of failure.

My wife is a certified member of the grammar police, so she is going to hate me for what I’m about to say. Most small businesses and organizations need to stop trying to “do”, and instead focus on “doing smart”. As a business, you must “do smart”.

I love watching “Survivorman” on the Discovery channel. One of the things that Les Stroud, the host and “survivor” on the show always does when he’s in a survival situation is be very methodical, practical, and intentional about his decisions. He must conserve water, decide what time to hike and what time to build a shelter. He must think through how much energy to expend hunting for food versus building a fire. Because of his environment he always has to think through his decisions with the long-term in mind—how will this particular action affect me tomorrow, or five days from now.

Business is not so different—we are all trying to survive. And just like Les we must always be very intentional about our decisions so that we don’t waste energy spinning our wheels. Successful business decisions are optimal decisions.

It’s Not About You

Finally, let’s go back to something I brought up earlier. Remember your brand is not what you say it is, it’s what your users say it is. Yes, it’s important to develop a vision and define a roadmap, but at the end of the day those initiatives aren’t about you, they’re about them. I mentioned before that the best means of getting to your destination is to determine the best way to reach your customers. You must always have your users in mind when developing your vision and your strategy—if you don’t, instead of deploying initiatives that work for your users, you’ll end up deploying initiatives at the expense of your users.

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Art Credit: “Wheat Field Under Threatening Skies”, Vincent van Gogh