I'm Ian Henderson. CEO of AML. We do advertising. We do content. We do digital. We started AML about ten years ago to do simple ideas for a complicated world.

Brands ultimately are about trust. It's what people believe, the consensus they hold in their heads about an individual, about a firm, or about a product. And ultimately, doing that well is all a successful brand strategy is. It will connect your audiences perception of you with your business strategy, what you're trying to achieve. It will tell them who you are. It will tell them what you do. Most importantly, why you do it - your purpose. And once you have that emotional connection with your audience, you'll get awareness, you'll get loyalty, you'll get trust, and ultimately you'll get more sales. So, having a brand strategy is a pretty good idea, but where do you start? Not with the brand. You start with the business. What you need to do is work out who you do it for, why you do it. What's the value proposition that sits in the centre of that? Because then you can find an idea, an idea that articulates that proposition and makes it come to life in the minds of your audience. You can use that to guide all of the behaviours that you exhibit.

So, the key elements are business, brand and behaviour. Key elements in that will be things like your logo. What colour is your business? What does it sound like? What does it sound like? What does it smell like maybe. What's the whole brand platform that sits around that core idea? Then you need to build the narrative. What can you do for the world? How are you going to make a difference? Why should I listen? All of that's great. What are you going to do with it? You're going to get it into the heads of the audience. And that's the third B - business, brand, behaviour. How are your audience behaving? Where are they? What are they interested in? What are they reading? What are they looking at? Which websites they're going to. How can you interrupt that process in order to make them listen to you? The way you do that is by understanding your audience. You do that through research, and then you monitor it.

Astonishingly, all of us see somewhere between five and 10,000 commercial messages every single day of our lives. How is your message going to cut through that?  How are you going to reach your audience when they're looking at all of that other stuff? The answer is you need to be impactful. You need to get noticed. Once you've got impact, you've got to be relevant, you've got to be useful to them and you've got to repeat that message far more often than you can possibly imagine. Good brand strategies build good businesses. Look at Amazon. Or if you prefer, look at Vanguard. That alignment of business branding behaviour are what works at any scale. How'd you get that into the heads of the audience? The way you do that is by understanding your audience. So, you can listen to them, you can research them, you can analyse data on them. Once you do that, you can find out what they're interested in, where they're looking for it, how to reach them, how to interrupt them. And you can create a media strategy around that audience. It's all built on that alignment. It's built on research, it's built on data, and it's built on constant monitoring. You keep watching, you keep learning, you keep testing, you keep refining overtime until you've got something that is really, really working. You can't take your eye off it for a second. So, what's the secret of a successful brand strategy? Short answer - There isn't one.

Making sure that that business proposition, that value proposition, is super clear. That's the first step. Second step is having an idea which differentiates, which connects with your audience on an emotional level. And the third step is making sure that the behaviours that you exhibit are consistent, clear. That three-step process is what we do at AML. And in our complicated world, that kind of simple idea is more valuable than ever.