A brand strategy is the set of decisions that tells everyone working on a brand what it stands for, who it serves, and how it differs from the alternatives. It is written down so that a designer, a copywriter and a media buyer who never meet still reach the same answer.
Most strategy documents fail at that last part. They run to sixty slides and settle nothing.
What does a brand strategy contain?
It has to settle five decisions.
- Audience. Who the brand is for, described tightly enough that you can also say who it is not for. "Everyone who values quality" is not an audience.
- Positioning. The one place the brand wants to sit in the buyer's mind compared with the alternatives. Positioning is one part of the strategy, not another word for it.
- Promise and proof. What the brand commits to, and the evidence that makes the commitment believable.
- Voice. How the brand sounds, and the phrases it never uses.
- Rules. What the brand will not do: channels it stays out of, collaborations it turns down, discounts it refuses to run.
The fifth is the one most documents skip, and it is the one that stops drift. A brand without rules gets redefined by whoever has the next campaign.
How is a brand strategy different from a marketing strategy?
A brand strategy decides who you are and what you promise. A marketing strategy decides how you reach people and which numbers you track. The first should change rarely. The second gets adjusted every quarter.
When both live in one document, the campaign plan ends up rewriting the brand every few months.
What does this look like on real work?
Two projects on our project pages show the pattern. A global fibre brand needed one creative framework that held across EMEA, APAC and the Americas, so the brand felt the same in each region. A UK socks brand needed an identity and guidelines that worked for trade buyers and for consumers. In both, the strategic decision came first and the logo, the guidelines and the campaign followed from it.
You can read the project descriptions as we published them on our projects page.
How do you test whether your brand strategy is specific enough?
Give the document to two people who have never spoken, say a freelance designer and a copywriter, and ask each for a first draft against the same brief. If the two drafts feel like the same brand, the strategy is specific. If they do not, the strategy is describing a feeling instead of making decisions.
This is a practical test, not an industry standard. It is cheap, and it fails quickly.
When do you need a brand strategy?
Four situations usually call for one: a rebrand, a move into a new market, a new product line, or a team where different people describe the brand differently.
If one of these is you, talk to us about brand strategy. Bring whatever you have written down so far, even if it is only a page.
