What is brand strategy, and what is not?

Brand strategy is the set of choices about what your brand stands for and who it's for.

It sets your position, the story you tell, and the reason someone ends up with you and not with someone else. That "someone" isn't just your customer, by the way. It's just as much the colleague who stays and the candidate you want to bring in.

The difference from how it's usually talked about: a brand strategy isn't a document you deliver and check off. It's a set of choices that only works once it shows up in what people do. Everything that comes after leans on it: your brand identity, your culture, the way customers experience you. If the foundation is off, or stays on paper, every euro you put into design or campaigns is a gamble.

What brand strategy is not

Three things often get mistaken for it. A logo, for one. But that's your brand identity, the visible form that follows from the strategy. A new logo without a strategy underneath is a different jacket on the same vague story.

A marketing plan, for another. Branding is different from marketing: the strategy determines who you are, marketing brings that to the outside world. Turn on your marketing without a brand strategy, and you're buying attention that doesn't stick anywhere.

And a tagline, last. A line that sounds good but doesn't rest on a real choice steers no one. The strategy sits in the choice underneath. The words come only after.

Why most brand strategies change nothing

This is usually where it goes wrong. A brand strategy gets delivered as a nice document: a positioning, a story, a set of sheets.

And then? If it stops there, nothing changes in how your people talk, sell and decide. The report disappears into a folder and the brand sounds the same as before.

The numbers point the same way. That same research found that companies who actually translate their approach into systems and behaviour grow 2.2 times faster than companies who leave it at a plan. And roughly a third of B2B companies missed their revenue targets in 2024. That doesn't prove it always comes down to strategy, but it does show how big the gap is between having a plan and doing something with it.

For us, that's the core of it. A brand strategy isn't an end product, it's a starting point. It only starts to count once the people on the phone, in sales and in the boardroom make the same choices. That's why our strategy doesn't stop at a document.

What does a brand strategy consist of?

A brand strategy isn't a thick report. It's a handful of choices you dare to make and dare to hold on to.

The first is your positioning: the place you want to occupy in your customer's head. And note, that's not the same as "being as different as possible." Research on brand growth shows that brands mostly lose ground when a customer links them to too few buying moments: the fewer situations in which they think of you, the faster they switch. So being remembered at the moment it counts weighs heavier than a clever distinction on paper.

The second is your story: where you come from and where you're headed, told in a way that gives direction internally and makes you recognizable externally.

The third, usually the hardest, is alignment. And not just at management level. In B2B, up to 80 percent of purchasing influence sits with people below management level, research shows, and your brand is carried just as much by the people on the phone as by the leadership team. A strategy that only reaches the top misses the largest part of your organisation and your market.

We never start from an assumption. We go into the organisation, talk to your people and your customers, and listen to the language that's already there. The strategy captures what's already true in your company, and sharpens it until the outside world finally sees it. We call that Shift the perspective.

When do you need a brand strategy?

Not every company needs a new brand strategy today. But there are moments when it suddenly starts to pinch.

A merger or acquisition. A succession where the brand needs to break free from the founder. A leap into a new market. Or the first marketer who comes in and finds no foundation to build on.

In those moments, more marketing doesn't help.

Then that's not a communication problem.

Then a strategy is missing, or one is stuck on paper.

What does this mean in practice?

For a company that's long since proven its quality, brand strategy isn't a luxury.

It's the difference between growing on your network and growing on your brand. The first eventually stalls. The second doesn't.

But then the strategy has to go into the organisation. For us, that's not a separate chapter tacked on afterward, it's the reason we work in four phases: from brand strategy to brand identity, brand culture and brand experience. The position on paper is step one. It only starts to count once your people make different choices and a customer notices the difference.

Curious how we approach that? You can read it on the brand strategy page.