Brand Strategy
Brand strategy is a set of decisions, not a document
Who you are for, what you are claiming, why anyone should believe it, and what you are deliberately not. Those four answers change what you sell, what you charge and what you turn down. If a strategy project ends without them being settled, it produced a document rather than a strategy.
The test for whether a strategy exists
If the work did not make anything harder to say yes to, it was not a strategy. A position that excludes nobody positions you against nobody, and it will not survive its first contact with a price negotiation.
This is the most useful question to ask about any brand strategy engagement, including ours. Six months later, is there a type of client, a type of project or a price point the business now declines that it would previously have accepted? If not, nothing was actually decided.
It also explains why so many strategy projects feel satisfying and change nothing. A statement everyone can agree with is easy to reach and costs nothing to ignore. A decision that removes options is uncomfortable, which is exactly why it has effects.
Symptoms
The commercial problems that turn out to be positioning problems
Nobody buys brand strategy because they want brand strategy. They buy it because something specific has stopped working, and these are the versions we see most often.
- You are being compared to the wrong companies.
- Buyers benchmark you against a set of alternatives they assembled themselves. If that set is dominated by cheaper, simpler providers, your price will always look unreasonable regardless of what you deliver. Changing the comparison set is a positioning decision, and it moves price perception faster than any sales training.
- Two senior people describe the company differently.
- Not a communications problem. It means the company has never actually decided, and both versions have been quietly operating in parallel — often serving different audiences with different offers, which is why proposals, pricing and marketing keep contradicting each other.
- You cannot say no to anything.
- Every enquiry gets pursued because there is no agreed basis for declining. The result is a portfolio of unrelated work, a team that cannot specialise, and a business that is genuinely hard to describe because it genuinely does everything.
- The explanation has become long.
- When it takes two minutes to say what the company does, buyers are doing that work themselves and the less motivated ones stop. Length of explanation is a measurable symptom, and it usually means the business is trying to be legible to two different audiences at once.
- Marketing produces volume with no argument.
- Plenty of activity, no shared idea of what any of it is trying to persuade anyone of. Each campaign starts from scratch because there is no agreed claim for it to build on, which makes marketing expensive and its results impossible to compound.
The substance
The decisions this work exists to settle
Each of these is a question with a real answer and a real cost to getting it wrong. The engagement is finished when they are settled, agreed and written down — not when the presentation is delivered.
- Who the business is for, defined tightly enough that some plausible buyers fall outside it
- Who it is explicitly not for, named rather than implied
- Which category you are choosing to be judged in, and therefore which competitors set the price expectation
- What you are claiming — one claim, not a list of capabilities
- What makes that claim credible to someone sceptical, and what evidence you have to supply
- What you are deliberately not doing, including services you could sell but will decline
- Which of your current revenue streams the strategy deprioritises, and what that costs in year one
- How the brand relates to any sub-brands, divisions, acquired names or location brands
- What language you will use for the category, and whether that language has search demand behind it
- What has to be true in twelve months for this to have been the right decision
How we get there
Research, options, decision, record
The decision meeting is the centre of the engagement. Everything before it exists to make that meeting informed, and everything after it exists to make the decision usable.
Talk to people outside the marketing team
Customers, recent buyers, prospects who chose someone else, the sales team and delivery staff. Lost-deal conversations are the highest-value hour in the whole engagement and the one businesses are most reluctant to arrange.
You get: Interview findings, including the language buyers actually use
Map the category as buyers see it
Who you are actually compared against, on what basis, and where the price expectation in that set comes from. This is frequently not the competitor list the leadership team would have written.
You get: Competitive set and category analysis
Build genuine options
Two or three distinct positions, each with what it wins, what it gives up and what it would cost to substantiate. A single recommendation is not a choice, and a choice is what the leadership team is being asked to make.
You get: Positioning options with explicit trade-offs
Hold the decision session
A working meeting, not a presentation. We do not leave with an ambiguous outcome, because an ambiguous outcome is what produces a document nobody uses. The exclusions are agreed here too, which is the part that takes the time.
You get: Agreed position and an agreed list of exclusions
Write the decision record
The position, the reasoning, the rejected alternatives and the twelve-month test. Short enough that people read it, specific enough that it settles arguments later.
You get: Decision record and rollout implications
Questions
Fair questions about a strategy engagement
What do we actually get at the end of a brand strategy project?
A set of agreed decisions, written down: who the business is for, who it is not for, what it claims, what makes the claim credible, which competitive set it is choosing to be judged against, and what it will now decline.
Alongside that, the research those decisions came from and the alternatives that were considered and rejected. The rejected options matter, because in eighteen months somebody will suggest one of them again and it is worth having the reasoning on record.
How is this different from a workshop we could run internally?
Internal workshops are good at surfacing what a leadership team already believes. They are poor at introducing what customers and lost prospects believe, because nobody in the room is that person.
The other difference is that an outside party can hold a disagreement open. Internal sessions tend to resolve tension by finding a form of words everyone can live with, which is exactly how you end up with a positioning that excludes nobody and therefore means nothing.
How long does it take?
Typically four to eight weeks. The variable is not our capacity, it is access — how quickly we can speak to your customers, your lost prospects and your sales team, and how available your leadership team is for the decision session.
Businesses that can supply five customer conversations in the first fortnight move considerably faster than businesses where that takes a month to arrange.
Do we need a new identity afterwards?
Not necessarily, and we will say so if the existing identity still works. Plenty of businesses reposition and keep their visual system entirely, because the problem was what they were saying rather than how it looked.
The identity question becomes real when the strategy changes who the buyer is or what the business is claiming to be, because the current design was built to signal something that is no longer true.
Can brand strategy fix a sales problem?
It can fix some sales problems and none of the others. If deals are lost because prospects do not understand the offer, compare you against the wrong alternatives, or cannot tell what makes you different, positioning addresses that directly.
If deals are lost because the product does not do what buyers need, the price is genuinely uncompetitive, or the sales process is slow, positioning will not help and we will tell you that rather than sell you a project.
Bring us the deals you keep losing
The fastest way to find a positioning problem is to look at recent losses and at how long it takes your best salesperson to explain the company. Bring both to a strategy call and we will tell you whether this is the right work.
Related
Where to go next
- the full brand practiceWhere strategy sits among identity, messaging and architecture.
- turning a position into languageThe next piece of work, once the decisions are made.
- visual identity systemsDesign expresses a decision that has already been taken.
- search demand researchVocabulary choices decide which demand you can reach.
- content planning
- the way we run engagements
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal