An Ultimate Guide to Writing a Strong Branding Statement

When it comes to your business, you need to invest all your efforts into making it respected and widely recognized. One of the steps you need to take to make this happen is to write a killer branding statement.

If you’re not sure how to do it, don’t worry. We’ve put together this guide to help you write a strong branding statement for your business.

Let’s dive in.

What is a Branding Statement?

Before we jump into our guide and explore the examples, let’s define the brand statement, its goal, and benefits.

A brand (branding) statement is a summary of what your company does, how and why you do it, and what makes your business and product unique.

A branding statement aims to introduce your business to a potential customer and help distinguish you from your competitors. That’s why a brand statement is an inalienable part of a successful brand strategy – it highlights the unique characteristics of your business.

A strong branding statement brings along quite a few benefits. Let’s take a look at them.

• Better brand recognition. A brand statement is a tool that helps bring forward your brand values which customers will associate with your business.
• Competitive edge. The branding statement also highlights the main perks of your product, differentiating you from your competitors.
• Higher customer loyalty. Since a brand statement emphasizes your business’s values, it helps you attract customers whose values resonate with yours.

How long should a brand statement be?

Since a branding statement is a brief summary of your company’s primary mission and goals, it should be no longer than one-two sentences. For instance, Kate Toon, a digital marketing specialist, fit her personal brand statement in just two sentences:

Credit: Kate Toon

The shorter the branding statement is, the better. After all, its goal is to show directly what your business is doing and how it can benefit your potential customers.

Difference between a Branding Statement and Mission Statement

Brand statements and mission statements often get confused. But there’s a distinctive difference between these two notions.

A brand statement aims to inform the public what your brand is and does. It briefly describes your product and how potential customers can benefit from it.

A mission statement is more about what your employees should do to achieve your brand’s goals. It’s also more descriptive than a brand statement and outlines the path that your organization takes to reach its objectives.

For some context, let’s take a look at Adidas’s brand and mission statements. The company’s brand statement simply describes what it’s about, what its product is, and how customers can use it:

In its turn, Adidas’s mission statement describes what the company strives to be:

In other words, a branding statement is more outward-oriented, while a mission statement is more inward-facing.

Now, let’s take a look at a step-by-step guide on how to write a strong branding statement for your business.

1. Start with Your Company’s Mission

You already know that a branding statement and a mission statement are two different things. But you can’t create a strong brand statement if you don’t have a clear mission statement. These two slogans work together to bring forward your company’s values and differentiate you from your competitors.

So, start by defining your company’s mission. Two strategies can help you outline the mission statement.

Strategy #1: Defining the purpose

A brand’s mission is about the purpose you want to fulfill as a company and how you want to impact your customers and society in general.

You can define your brand’s purpose by following these steps:

• Highlight your core values. Select three brand values that drive growth and what you care about the most.
• Think about brands that inspired you. Go through their mission statements and consider how they resonate with you.
• Think about your legacy. What if your company went out of business? What impact would it leave behind?
• Select the main goals of your brand. These goals have nothing to do with revenue but rather your brand’s lasting impact on your customers.

Once you find out the answers to each of these points, you will have a clear understanding of your brand’s purpose.

Strategy #2: Highlighting the advantages

Another strategy that can help you define your brand’s mission is about emphasizing the benefits of what you do.

For instance, Google’s key goal is to build the world’s most comprehensive search engine. What benefits can this goal bring?

• the information will be thoroughly organized
• the internet resources will be more accessible
• all the information online will be highly credible and useful

All these benefits are captured in Google’s mission statement:

We already mentioned that a mission statement is inward-oriented. In other words, it reminds you and your employees what you need to do to achieve your goals.

But once you have a clear understanding of your mission, it will be easier for you to recognize its impact on your customers and, as a result, build a solid branding statement.

2. Describe Your Long-Term Goals

As you know, a branding statement should reflect your company’s goals to show your consumers how they can benefit from becoming your customers.

Here, we should differentiate the goals for the branding statement from your usual business goals.

When it comes to a branding statement, we’re talking more about long-term goals. For instance, Google’s goal is to build a comprehensive search engine. Have they done it already? A lot of work has been done, but the result is still far from perfect.

Thus, all your business goals will become objectives that you need to reach on your way to the primary goal. For example, if your ultimate goal is to build an agile WordPress plugin, creating a one-click WordPress install function will just be an objective to achieve the final goal.

How to describe long-term goals for your branding statement?

The goal here is to think, what your business will accomplish in the distant future. While objectives and usual business goals are more time-bound and you can apply the SMART model to them, it won’t work for the long-term goals.

A long-term goal should:

• give the vision of what your brand and product will end up being
• have a clear direction
• provide the ability for you to set specific objectives to reach it

When you have a profound understanding of your long-term goals, they can form the foundation of your branding statement.

You can see how having a clear goal helped Mari Smith, a Facebook marketing specialist, form her personal brand statement:

The first sentence of the paragraph above is her brand statement that reveals her goal to help businesses get exposure online. How fast will they get it? There’s no way to tell since each of her clients requires a personal approach. But that’s the ultimate result she promises to her clients as a brand.

3. Reveal Your Vision for the Future

Another thing you need to consider before writing a branding statement is a vision statement, which is often confused with mission statements and long-term goals.

A vision statement is what your company hopes will happen in the future if you reach your long-term goals and fulfill your mission. In other words, it’s the most significant benefit your long-term goals and your mission can bring.

It’s important to understand that your vision is not your brand’s strategy. Evan Mitchell, a marketing specialist, and writer at ThesisOnTime emphasizes that a strategy is about the deliverables that move the company towards its vision. In other words, vision is about what and where, while a strategy is about how.

You can clearly see what a brand’s vision should be from IKEA’s vision statement:

The brand’s vision describes the most prominent advantage it can bring to its customers. So, to define a strong branding statement, think about your vision and how it will change your customers’ world for the best.

4. Think about What Makes You Unique

When writing your branding statement, think about what makes your brand different from everybody else. These unique features will create the image of your brand in the eyes of your customers. And, your customers will associate your brand with these features later on.

A great example of a branding statement that reflects the brand’s unique traits is Pam Moore, a marketing consultant. In her branding statement, she describes herself as a half marketer, half geek, but she always promises 100% business results:

Pam’s branding statement focuses on her outstanding features right away. But it also reflects her goal and her main mission and value – help businesses get successful marketing results.

Here’s what you need to determine your brand’s unique traits:

• How can your product change your customer’s lives? From this perspective, consider how you can make your customers’ everyday lives better in the long run.
• How are you different from your competitors? Take a look at your competitors’ products’ outstanding features and think about what makes you different.
• How can your brand change the world? Lastly, think about the bigger image and how your brand can impact society and improve its life in the future.

Highlighting your unique features can be a winning strategy, especially if your industry is highly competitive. You need to let your customers know what differentiates you from others and how they can benefit from it.

5. Emphasize Memorable Details

Similar to unique features, your branding statement can also bring forward your product’s or service’s most memorable details. You can use your branding statement to highlight the features of your product that create value for the customers, but the goal is to pick the most outstanding and unique traits.

For example, your branding statement can highlight how many customers have already benefited from your product or service. That’s what SEMrush has successfully done in its brand statement:

The brand’s statement starts by briefly listing its main products. And then, to amplify the product’s purpose, SEMrush mentions that it has already helped 7 million marketers successfully achieve great results. This is a very compelling message that fits well in a brand statement.

6. Show Brand Personality

If your industry and niche are highly competitive, you can dedicate your branding statement to showcasing your brand’s personality to help your business stand out.

A brand personality describes a set of human characteristics that a brand possesses. Using a brand personality in a branding statement can be extremely effective since it helps customers relate to the brand. Besides, 86% of people prefer buying from an authentic and honest brand personality.

Procter & Gamble’s current brand statement is a great example of how to incorporate a brand’s personality in it:

Here, PG showcases its values as a brand that focuses on serving people rather than gaining revenue. Hence, it resonates with all the people who choose service over-enrichment. And those who know the brand’s personality also see that it’s very focused on different social causes.

7. Finish Your Branding Statement with a Simple Conclusion

When you’re done with the main part of your branding statement, you can move forward to writing a conclusion. A conclusion is only necessary if your branding statement is more than one sentence.

What can you conclude your branding statement with?

Here are some ideas:

• a number of customers you’ve helped (like SEMrush)
• the primary value your brand serves
• the main customer needs your product fulfills
• the results that your brand can help deliver

The main idea here is to keep your conclusion concise – it should take a few words or up to one sentence.

Writing a Branding Statement

Even though a branding statement is only a couple of sentences, there’s a lot of work that goes into preparing a good statement that brings forward your brand’s values.

Here’s what it takes to write a solid brand statement:

• start with a brand mission
• describe long-term goals
• think about your company vision
• highlight the points that make your brand unique
• emphasize memorable details about your product/service
• incorporate your brand’s personality in the statement
• finish with a brief but meaningful conclusion

Hopefully, our guide will help you write a strong branding statement that will help your company and product stand out.