Any organization, be it a start-up or an established company, leaves immense value on the table when it underestimates the power of one of its hardest-working business assets: its brand. This is a mistake. In trying economic times, when companies are faced with tight budgets and limited resources, your brand is one of the most powerful weapons in your marketing arsenal—it amplifies the force of all your marketing communications, helping you achieve twice as much with half the effort.

Our experience working with clients who have limited time and budgets has helped us develop a few tactics for creating a lean and mean version of critical brand positioning and assets when a full-service branding effort seems out of reach.

Rapid research phase

Instead of an industry-standard three-month research phase, create your brand positioning in a small one-day workshop. Typical brand processes can get bogged down in long research phases that don’t necessarily add significant value. That’s not to say research isn’t beneficial—but when time and resources are short, the cost-to-benefit ratio is low.

Stick to the essentials

Some brand assets are nice to have and some are must-haves. Which are which? It’s a matter of quality over quantity—focus on the brand assets that will work hardest for you. Usually this means concentrating on a meaningful name, a strong visual identity, audience-specific messages, and indispensable assets like your website. All your communications will go further if you’re smart about which touchpoints reach which audiences best.

Bring all decision makers to the table

Anyone with veto power should be on the brand team, and the entire decision-making team should be at all key meetings. Objections and concerns that come late in the process can knock the legs out from under a strategy, resulting in delays, extra work, or worse, a strategy that isn’t sound or fully supported.

Small client and vendor teams, working close and fast

This is not the kind of work that can be done faster with more people to share the labor. Brand strategy hinges on different people understanding and agreeing upon very abstract concepts and then translating them into actionable tools. More people in the mix will make this process more time-consuming. If there are too many decision makers to qualify as a “small” team, take a closer look at who needs to be a decision maker. There is a distinction between getting everyone’s input and giving everyone a vote.

The bottom line

Cutting back on a brand is an option. But cutting it out is not. That translates to lost revenue and untapped value. Think of your brand as a business asset that needs to be continuously fine-tuned to work as hard as possible for you. Keeping your brand in top shape is crucial to business success.

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