This month, Wray Ward partnered with the Home Improvement Research Institute (HIRI) to produce an exclusive webinar on the fundamentals of brand building to drive growth. Our agency’s own Leslie Gillock, vice president and director of insights, explored strategies that can help companies develop meaningful marketing objectives, understand their audience, differentiate their brand and meet their customers’ needs.

HIRI is the only nonprofit research organization dedicated to helping home improvement brands make better business decisions, and we were thrilled to team up on this critical topic. Miss the 40-minute webinar? Watch the full recording below, or visit HIRI online to download a copy of the presentation.

Meanwhile, here are just a few of the quotables from Leslie’s talk:

Reflections on Building and Remodeling Your Home Improvement Brand

1. A brand is the sum of everything you feel about a product: its attributes, name, price, history and reputation; how it’s advertised; how you receive that advertising; and more.

2. By definition, strong brands are unique. Singularity helps strong brands avoid being viewed as a commodity. This, in turn, helps move conversations beyond price.

3. Customers associate strong brands with trust and reliability. They reward these brands with preference.

4. Strong brands are resilient, making them better able to resist and adapt to market shifts and competitor actions.

5. Strong brands are also more profitable, have more pricing flexibility, can charge a premium and will net higher margins.

6. But brands can only be strong if they have a strong strategic foundation. Otherwise, their marketing may be inconsistent and/or reactionary.

7. To build that strong strategic foundation, strong brands start with immersion, asking lots of questions and mining the answers for patterns and exceptions that lead them to key insights.

8. Successful brands leverage the intellectual capital that already exists in their business. This can come from subject matter experts, business leaders, the marketing department and more.

9. Category. Climate. Company. Competition. Customers. These considerations can help you determine what home improvement projects are increasing in popularity, how shifting demographics are affecting the landscape and much, much more.

10. Of the above, “customers” may be the most critical. Spend a lot of effort here, mapping and prioritizing your audiences and digging into personas. Personas (think “emerging home enthusiast”) go well beyond basic demographics, incorporating key mindsets and motivations, purchase criteria, category and brand attitudes, media habits and more.

11. Outperforming the competition isn’t about one-upping them. Instead, it starts with understanding the competitive landscape. Can you home in on white space opportunities to engage with your audience and position the brand?

12. Marketing is an emotional business, so it’s natural for marketers to want to dive right into tactical creative development. But it’s absolutely critical to build the strategic foundation first. This will allow you to establish your overall brand look and feel, presence, language and other elements that should inform your website, advertising, collateral and tactical pieces. The result? A cleaner, tighter, more cohesive plan... and a more satisfactory outcome.

Have questions about the information presented here? Interested in a deeper dive? Want to know how Wray Ward can help your home improvement brand build a strong strategic foundation? Email me.