Mastering the “Five Brand Pillars”: How to Develop Your Brand’s Power Pillars

Your brand is what makes you instantly recognizable to your target audience. It gives your audience the confidence to know that your company will meet their needs. To have a successful company, you must establish a brand identity that connects to your target audience, which endures, so your brand becomes synonymous with the goods or services you are trying to sell.

Why Are Power Pillars Required?

We have a client seeking a brand refresh to establish their position post-pandemic marketplace and changing times. Their industry is highly competitive, and new options have entered the marketplace with larger marketing budgets. Their past agency presented numerous creative directions for their last brand refresh, but none established a position for the brand moving forward.

To move forward, we established the following:

• What their objective is to help them achieve their overarching goal.
• What their customer personas are.
• What their key brand pillars are and make sure all agree.
• A manifesto based upon the five power pillars.
• A positioning statement and a tagline that ties everything together.

This platform is unique to the brand’s position in the marketplace and is utilized moving forward in all brand and marketing communications.

Building Your Brand Pillars

To create a solid foundation for your brand to build upon, you must understand and develop your brand’s power pillars. Think of the “Five key power Pillars” as 1) Purpose, 2) Perception, 3) Personality, 4) Position, and 5) Promotion. When you establish a marketing program or campaign, it is highly recommended to revisit your power pillars and have an established brand book that communicates and maintains all vision and guidelines. All communication efforts moving forward must tie back into the agreed power pillars. The following outlines the key pillars and overall power pillar requirements.

The Purpose Pillar: Relevance

You created or joined your company because you saw a need that needed to be filled; what was that need? How does your brand fit a niche in the marketplace, and how do you communicate that to consumers with the way you represent your brand?

The Personality and Positioning Pillars: Differentiation

The personality and positioning pillars are all about differentiation. What is distinctively unique about your brand? What features do you offer that other companies don’t? What is the personality of your target audience, and how does your company’s brand intersect with that?

The Perception Pillar: Esteem  

In the digital world, reputation is everything. You want people to see your brand and immediately know that yours is a company they can trust. The perception of your brand should reflect your personality and that of your potential customers.

The Promotion Pillar: Knowledge

The more you know about your brand, the more quickly you will influence potential customers. The way you promote your brand is informed by your knowledge of your company and what your target audience responds to.

Using Your Brand Pillars to Your Advantage

If you’re trying to determine why you do not see the results you think you deserve from your company’s marketing efforts, examining your brand’s power pillars is a great place to start. If your brand has a solid foundation based on carefully considering these power pillars, the rest should flow much more easily.