It’s the middle of the summer, a time for rest and relaxation, and also a good time to start thinking about next year’s plan. Before you start thinking tactics, it is essential that your brand strategy provides leadership, guidance, and inspiration for your customers and your company.

During previous summers, we worked with a leading consumer technology company to reposition them as an “entertainment technology” company; we helped a multi-billion dollar grocer position their brand to make “healthier eating affordable”, and partnered with a startup medical device company to shake up a stagnant category.

So while you’re recharging your personal batteries this summer, roll the following questions around in your head to assess your brand readiness for 2011:

1. Do you have a clear understanding of current and emerging customer needs in your category and ecosystem?

2. Do you have a clear understanding of how your competitors are positioning their brands in the market?

3. Do you know where your brand stands with your customers and prospects?

4. Do you know have a clear sense of how employees feel about your brand? Can they speak about it consistently and confidently?

5. Does your current brand positioning provide differentiation vs. your competitors and relevance to your customers and prospects?

6. Do your current brand assets represent the essence of your brand and support the position? Can your design and communication materials be deployed quickly and easily in web 2.0 environments (social media websites, mobile web and apps, new devices such as iPad)?

7. Do you have brand messaging for use in traditional and web 2.0 environments? Do your organization and communication partners have the focus and training to develop new brand messaging on an ongoing basis?

8. Does the organization of your sub-brands, and product and service naming provide a clear picture to the market of what you do and maximize value?

9. Do you have useful supporting documents and presentations of your brand strategies for internal communication and training?

10. Do you have a way to measure the performance of your brand in the marketplace to drive continuous improvement and value creation?

At SieckGrowth, this is the kind of work we do for our clients every day: developing customer insights, evaluating the competition, assessing current brand perceptions, developing positioning, messaging, and breakthrough design, formulating brand hierarchy and naming conventions, and designing and implementing brand metrics. We work for startups and Global 2,000 companies in retail, consumer products and technology, pharma and biotech, and business-to-business brand marketing.

Happy summer!

A big part of our business is developing insights for our clients. Insights into their customers, into what the competition is up to, into where the category is headed; even insights into how their organization feels about their brand.

We do get to some very good insights. Like for Regus, the world’s largest operator of on-demand office space, it wasn’t about having an office it was about the feeling that you had a real business. Having an office legitimized the business. For IRI, our insight was that information—or data—had become commoditized, but insights were highly valuable. As a result of our insight, IRI went on to refocus their considerable business on analytics to get to deeper insights. For SunPower, a large maker of PV solar panels for residential application, we thought the insight would be about going green. It turned out that their customers needed to understand the financial implications before they could rationalize the considerable expense on the basis of environmental responsibility.

What qualified the examples above as insights were three factors. First, the insight provided new understanding about a customer need. Second, the insight had the ability to change the way the company did business, and finally, the insight could be sourced from a fact-base. Since a real insight should have the potential to positively impact the business, a basis in fact is critical to build the case for investment.

What concerns me about the insight business is that there seems to be a lot of faux insights out there. I would label any insight that is based on “different”, “change” or “better” as a cop-out. I was really disappointed to see a display in the Apple store this weekend that said: “The App Store: this changes everything”. Besides being a bit unimaginative, it’s also a bit of an over-promise. From an insight perspective, change doesn’t really connote a positive benefit. It’s just…change.

Developing an insight is grueling work. It requires the requisite situational assessment, perhaps conducting hours of in-depth interviews or other qualitative research, iterating on themes with whoever will listen; associates, friends, clients. And then bringing it altogether in such a way that a group of people understand it and fall in love with it. It’s a tall order, but getting to a true insight is what it’s all about.