Brand Pyramid Marketing Tool: Brand Pyramid Template Tiers

A brand pyramid is a marketing tool you can use to answer fundamental questions about what your company has to offer and how to frame that effectively for customers. By starting with the basic attributes of a given product, brands can work their way up the brand pyramid to more explicitly define core values and messaging priorities. This methodology is just as effective for digital marketing strategies as it is for more traditional approaches.

When you sketch out a brand pyramid, begin by describing a product’s basic features, then move on to the function these features provide to customers. Next, decide on what you hope your products and brand image make your customers feel on an emotional level. Only then do you begin to to more clearly define your brand persona and crystallize the essence of your brand identity.

Brand pyramids help companies align on both internal and external levels. Here are benefits that display how this tool can help you implement a strong brand strategy:

• Greater clarity: As you work through a brand pyramid exercise, you gain more clarity about how to bring nebulous brand ideas into clearer focus. This sort of clarity empowers you to better connect both inwardly as a company and outwardly with customers. From marketing research to product development, this sort of brand clarity proves useful.
• Increased customer engagement: By utilizing a brand pyramid to crystallize what your company has to offer, you can more effectively craft your content marketing to reach your target audience. Well-defined marketing campaigns lead to both increased brand awareness among new potential customers and greater brand loyalty from your current consumer base.
• More organizational cohesion: The better you define your company’s brand values, the more internal cohesion you can expect. By getting all key stakeholders on the same page in the marketing mix, you make decision-making more efficient, priorities clearer, and strategization easier to accomplish. Additionally, working on a brand pyramid together as a team will also increase camaraderie among staff members.

Building a brand pyramid can help anchor a savvy and effective marketing strategy. Use these five elements as a template to better define your company, its identity, and what it can offer to customers. The tiers of a brand pyramid, from the bottom upward, should be:

1. 1. Features and attributes: At the lowest tier of the brand pyramid, list all the basic features of your product with no additional frills. For instance, suppose your company sells apple juice. Basic product features would include the ingredients in the juice mixture, whether it’s organic or not, and which kind of apples you use for the base of the recipe. Similarly, you might list the packaging materials—like plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and so on—in which you plan to sell the juice.
2. 2. Functional benefits: Once you have the basic product features down, move up to the second-lowest level of the brand pyramid to explain what sets your specific product apart from similar ones on the market. For example, all car manufacturers fundamentally provide the same product—a vehicle for point-to-point travel; however, each car company provides unique value propositions to differentiate from competitors.
3. 3. Emotional benefits: In the middle tier of the pyramid, define which specific emotions you hope your products and services bring up in consumers. Companies want to make their customers feel positive emotions. Imagine you sell soda—in this instance, you could arrange your brand positioning around recapturing the first time a customer tasted soda as a child. By utilizing nostalgia to hearken to the innocence and excitement of childhood, you encourage customers to associate your brand with the same emotions.
4. 4. Brand persona: Once you know how you want customers to react emotionally to your advertising, it’s time to craft a specific brand personality on the second-highest tier of the brand pyramid. Gain increased customer loyalty by giving your brand voice human characteristics. For example, some brands might take on a laid-back and humorous brand persona, while others might hope to establish themselves with a more authoritative voice.
5. 5. Brand identity: After you lay the groundwork for your brand pyramid, you can finally build out the apex of the entire structure by defining the core of your brand essence. Define who you are as a company and what you provide to customers—both functionally and emotionally—in a single sentence or slogan. The more succinctly you can state your brand identity, the more definition it will have in the minds of consumers.

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