Our Brand Leader white paper on marketing skills At Beloved Brands, we use a 360-degree approach to marketing, which can highlight the skills you need to be successful in running your brand. You must know how to analyze the performance of your brand through a deep-dive business review. Brand Leaders have to be able to think strategically to sort through issues and make decisions on direction. You must know how to define your brand with a positioning statement and a brand idea. Marketers need to understand how to write a brand plan that everyone can follow.

1. THE BRAND LEADER
The marketing skills you need to
be a successful Brand Leader
At Beloved Brands, we use a 360-degree approach to marketing, which can highlight the
skills you need to be successful in running your brand. You must know how to analyze the
performance of your brand through a deep-dive business review. Brand Leaders have to
be able to think strategically to sort through issues and make decisions on direction. You
Beloved Brands We make brand leaders smarter

2. must know how to define your brand with a positioning statement and a brand idea.
Marketers need to understand how to write a brand plan that everyone can follow.
Moreover, marketers should learn the skills required to inspire smart and creative
marketing execution that builds a brand that consumers will love.Let’s use this 360-
degree model to highlight the skills you need for each of the five areas. Below, I have
broken down each of the five areas into 4 unique marketing skills. This will leave you with
20 overall marketing skills you need to be great.
1. Analyze performance
Too few marketers take the time to dig into the data analytics. There is no value in having
access to data if you are not using it to discover meaningful insights. The best brand
leaders can tell strategic stories through analytics. You need to know how to create a
deep-dive business review, looking at the marketplace, consumers, competitors,
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3. channels, and brand. Moreover, you need to be able to turn your analysis into a written
report or a presentation for management. You need to know brand finance, to know every
financial formula you need to run your brand.
• Understand all the potential sources of brand data you can use to evaluate the
situation. These include market share, consumption, shipment data, brand funnel,
advertising tracking, market research studies, and financial statements.
• Know how to dig deep into data, using draws comparisons and development indexes to
find the data breaks. Draw out insights and conclusions that you can turn into a story to
help your team debate and make decisions.
• Able to lead a best-in-class 360-degree deep-dive business review for the brand that
looks at the marketplace, consumers, channels, competitors and the brand results to
give a holistic view of the brand’s performance.
• Once you have all your findings, you need to be able to write analytical stories that
include performance reports and key issues presentations. Then, you need to be able to
outline the strategic implications of the brand’s current situation.
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4. 2. Think Strategically
Too many marketers are so busy that they do not even have time to think. The best
brand leaders do the necessary
critical strategic thinking to find
ways to win in the market. Strategic
thinking is an essential foundation,
forcing marketers to ask big
questions that challenge and focus
brand decisions.
There are four ways to enhance your
strategic thinking, using the brand’s
core strength finder, consumer
strategy, competitive strategy, and
situational strategy. As you frame
your strategy, you should learn to
think and then talk in a method that
lays out the vision for your brand, focuses your limited resources on breakthrough points,
takes advantage of opportunities you see in the market, finds early wins to leverage to
give your brand a positional power to drive growth and profits for your brand.
• Ask the right interrupting and challenging questions to help slow your brain down to a
reflection speed. Make sure you understand the issues surrounding the brand before
you reach for solutions
• Take a 360-degree strategic view by looking at your brand’s core strength, how
consumers engage, the stance your competitors are taking, and the current business
situation you face
• Able to lead a well-thought strategic debate across the organization. Ensure sales,
operations, product development, and senior leaders have their say.
• Make smart strategic decisions that map out a vision, focuses the brand's limited
resources, takes advantage of an opportunity, gains an early win that can be leveraged
to drive added power or incremental profits.
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5. 3. Define the brand
Too many marketers are trying to be everything to anyone. This strategy is the usual
recipe for becoming nothing to everyone. The best brand leaders target a specific
motivated consumer audience and then define their brand around a brand idea that is
interesting, simple, unique, motivating and ownable.
You have to know the
fundamental ways for how
to write a winning brand
positioning statement with
four essential elements:
target market, competitive
set, main benefit and
reason to believe (RTB).
Learn how to build a brand
idea that leads every
touchpoint of your brand,
including the brand
promise, brand story,
innovation, purchase
moment and experience.
Moreover, you have to
know the tools for how to write a winning brand concept and brand story.
• Define your ideal consumer target. Build out consumer profiles framed with need states,
consumer insights, enemies and the desired response.
• Take a consumer-centric mindset to turn brand features (what you do) into functional
benefits (what consumers get) and emotional benefits (how it makes them feel)
• Find a winning brand positioning statement that is own-able for your brand and
motivates consumers to build a tighter bond with the brand.
• Develop a brand idea that is interesting, simple, unique, inspiring, motivating and
ownable. You must be able to stretch that brand idea across every consumer
touchpoint, including the brand promise, story, innovation, purchase moment and
consumer experience.
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6. 4. Create Brand Plans
Too many marketers focus on a short-term to-do list, not a long-term plan. The best
brand leaders write brand plans everyone in the organization can follow with ease,
including senior management, sales, R&D, agencies and operational teams. You have to
know how to write each element of the brand plan, including the brand vision, purpose,
values, goals, key Issues, strategies, and tactics. You must be able to build execution
plans including a brand communications plan, innovation plan, and in-store plan.
• Lead the development of all elements of a smart brand plan; vision, purpose, goals,
issues, strategies, tactics.
• Know how to turn strategic thinking into smart strategic objective statements that can
stand as the foundation of the brand plan
• Able to use the brand plan presentation to convince senior management to follow the
issues and strategies you lay out, and garner the necessary support across the
organization.
• Develops smart execution plans that deliver against the brand strategies, and steer
each execution team to stay on strategy.
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7. 5. Inspire creative execution
Too many marketers are becoming task-masters and stepping over the line into
execution. The best brand leaders need to inspire experts to produce smart and creative
execution. You need tools and techniques for judging and making decisions on creative
advertising from your agency. For judging execution, I use the ABC’s tool, believing the
best executions must drive Attention (A), Brand link (B), Communication (C) and
Stickiness (S). I also have a checklist for you to use when judging executions. One crucial
skill is being able to give direction to your agency to inspire and challenge great
execution.
• Write strategic, focused and thorough creative briefs that will inspire great work from
those experts who will execute on your brand’s behalf.
• Capable of leading all marketing projects whether they are on brand communication,
innovation, selling or experience.
• Able to inspire greatness from experts at agencies or throughout the organization to
offer their greatest work on your brand.
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8. • Makes smart marketing execution decisions that will help tighten the bond with
consumers, put the brand into a more powerful position and drive long-term success
that matches up tot he strategy.
How good is your marketing playbook?
I believe you need a playbook that covers each of these skills. Here are the skills you
need to be able to bring out when needed in your role.
Conduct your own assessment of your marketing skills
Taking this a step further, use our assessment tool to highlight your own marketing skill
gaps. Once you identify these skill gaps, you can use our book or our brand training
programs to close those gaps.
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9. Beloved Brands: Who are we?
At Beloved Brands, our purpose is to help brands find a new pathway to growth. We
believe that the more love your brand can generate with your most cherished consumers,
the more power, growth, and profitability you will realize in the future.
We think the best solutions are likely inside you already, but struggle to come out. Our
unique playbook tools are the backbone of our workshops. We bring our challenging voice
to help you make decisions and refine every potential idea.
We start by defining a brand positioning statement, outlining the desired target,
consumer benefits and support points the brand will stand behind. And then, we build a
brand idea that is simple and unique enough to stand out in the clutter of the market,
motivating enough to get consumers to engage, buy and build a loyal following with your
brand.
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10. We will help you write a strategic brand plan for the future, to get everyone in your
organization to follow. It starts with an inspiring vision that pushes your team to imagine
a brighter future. We use our strategic thinking tools to help you make strategic choices
on where to allocate your brand’s limited resources.
Our brand playbook methodology will challenge you to
unlock future growth for your brand
1. Our deep-dive assessment process will give you the knowledge of the issues facing
your brand, so you can build a smart plan to unleash future growth.
2. Find a winning brand positioning statement that motivates consumers to buy, and
gives you a competitive advantage to drive future growth.
3. Create a brand idea to capture the minds and hearts of consumers, while inspiring and
focusing your team to deliver greatness on the brand’s behalf.
4. Build a brand plan to help you make smart focused decisions, so you can organize,
steer, and inspire your team towards higher growth.
5. Advise on advertising, to find creative that drives branded breakthrough and use a
motivating messaging to set up long-term brand growth.
6. Our brand training program will make your brand leaders smarter, so you have added
confidence in their performance to drive brand growth.
You have my personal promise to help you solve your brand building challenges. I will
give you new thinking, so you can unlock future growth for your brand.
Graham Robertson
Founder and CMO, Beloved Brands Inc.
Beloved Brands We make brand leaders smarter

11. To learn more about this type of thinking, you should explore
my new book, Beloved Brands.
With Beloved Brands, you will learn everything you need to know so you can build a brand that
your consumers will love.
You will learn how to think strategically, define your brand with a positioning statement and a
brand idea, write a brand plan everyone can follow, inspire smart and creative marketing
execution and analyze the performance of your brand through a deep-dive business review.
Beloved Brands We make brand leaders smarter