Brand Strategy is the thread that connects business to people. Internally, brand strategies serve as a roadmap to make better, faster, more meaningful decisions. Externally, a brand strategy is the emotional backbone of a business, representing how a business resonates with its customers. It’s the definition of the big questions: Who are we? Why do we exist? What are we trying to accomplish? Who are we trying to help?
What is brand strategy?
Brand strategy is the single source of truth for a company as it grows, evolves and pivots. Plenty of brands exist without formalizing a brand strategy, but what often happens is the vision is only understood by one person — which is fine if the company is small and that founder can be touching all aspects of leadership, operations, sales, marketing.
At the critical inflection point of growth, a divide begins between brand identity and founder identity.
If a brand is like a child that more people are responsible for, everyone needs to understand how that child is meant to be raised.
But brand strategy is not about dictatorship, it’s about defining the guiding principles for how to look at problem solving, how to evaluate opportunity and how to treat customers. It’s the handbook that every passenger studies to make smart autonomous decisions that align to a singular direction. How we get to the destination is up for debate, but where we’re going is non-negotiable.
With that foundation in place, brand strategy becomes the operating system for every department — especially marketing.
How does a brand strategy help marketing teams?
We often think of brand as a subset of marketing, something that evolves over time and takes the shape of successful marketing campaigns and repels failure. This serves the function of sales, but it doesn’t serve the function of mission.
This is a common trap. Rather than staying steadfast in our direction, we bend (and break) the brand into fragmented pieces, chasing opportunity that might put a win in the revenue column, but might cause even more collateral damage than the revenue was ever worth.
Creating a successful brand strategy takes guts. It’s a commitment to stay true to the purpose of the company. That’s easier said than done. It’s hard to say no to shiny new objects. But it’s easier when you can compare decisions against direction.
Creating a successful brand strategy takes guts. It’s a commitment to stay true to the purpose of the company.
Brand Strategy also dictates what makes a company unique, what are our selling points are, and who are we trying to help. All extremely important questions for a company to address. Questions that give marketing teams a focus to conduct better experiments that bring the company closer to fulfilling its vision.
Marketing teams no longer need to make decisions on “how do we want ad copy to sound?”; “who should we target?”; “what competitors should we look at?”; “what are the unique selling points?”
Instead, the brand strategy has alleviated the high level thinking and the goals, and marketing can focus on being masterful tacticians for the brand, no longer needing to build the plane as it’s flying.
Beyond marketing, brand strategy directly impacts the financial trajectory of a company.
How does a brand strategy increase revenue?
Brand strategy helps revenue through diving into what makes a company different. This is called differentiation, or market differentiation. Doing an assessment of other companies doing similar things in your market, and pinpointing the things that you do better.
Brand strategy also increases revenue through identifying what’s missing in the market that people are asking for, or how we can deliver a service better than the competition. This doesn’t always involve operational change, although if the opportunity is big enough it might. Often we can outsmart our competition just by hanging our hat on the things that they already do, but don’t say they do. People buy with emotion, not logic. If we can evoke a feeling of comfort, simplicity, convenience, prestige, etc., then we’re steps ahead.
If we have a road lined with fruit stands all selling oranges, and all vendors except one view this as nothing more than selling a product, we get the sameness. All vendors except one require you to bring a bag and pay with cash. One vendor has a mission: Make sustenance easy.
This vendor looks at things differently. Provides customers with a bag, bags your groceries, and accepts card — that extra attention to your shopping experience translates to loyal customers and higher lifetime value. They’re fulfilling the mission of making nutrition easy. These customers have no reason to try another vendor. That’s a simple illustration, but this is what strong brand thinking can uncover. Here are the kinds of questions that shape differentiation:
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- What does the competition sell?
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- How can we sell more by offering a better service that is true to our values?
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- Can we differentiate the product?
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- Is there a better way to package the product to differentiate from the competition?
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- Is there a way for customers to not rationalize price, but pay for convenience?
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- Is there room for other products that increase customer loyalty?
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- Which customers buy the most oranges?
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- Is there inherent differentiation in the product? (ie, are the oranges sourced from Florida or California?)
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- Are oranges all they’re looking for?
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- Is there opportunity to expand?
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- Would it be more convenient to our customers to offer cold press juice?
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- Could there be an opportunity to diversify?
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- Could there be an opportunity to deliver oranges?
- Could there be an opportunity to deliver oranges?
The answer to each of these questions varies drastically. One vendor over another can answer them entirely differently. And they would have two very different brands. This is where brand is born.
If a marketing team’s mandate is to sell more oranges, they’ll try their best, but in a crowded market sales will inevitably plateau. Without thinking about the foundations of the brand, marketing is severely limited by the levers they can pull. This is the ROI of a brand strategy. It’s in the marketing team’s application of how the business is framed.
Often it’s not a complete pivot, but a collection of well-thought out touchpoints that add up to big wins. This is a function of brand strategy, not marketing.
To have a full understanding of how to brand strategy helps to guide teams, we need to look at the building blocks of a successful brand strategy.
What are the key elements of a successful brand strategy?
The key elements of a successful brand strategy fall under three buckets: Purpose, Positioning, People.
Purpose
Purpose is a company’s reason for existing, outside of making money. It’s the driving force of why a company does what it does, what it stands for, and what it stands against.
Mission statement: A clear description of what the company does, who it serves, and why it matters today.
Vision statement: A forward-looking declaration of the future the company is working to create.
Once purpose is defined, the next step is determining how the brand competes and stands apart.
Positioning
Positioning is how a company differentiates itself from other companies in a similar industry or market. Key deliverables of a successful positioning strategy are a competitive audit, a value statement for your customer, a positioning statement against your competition, your unique selling points, and a gap analysis.
Competitive audit: an exploration of your company versus your competition’s across a predetermined set of criteria. Once the competition is identified and the criteria set, it becomes easier to think from your customer’s lens — What are they missing? What are they asking for that they don’t have or could be done better?
Positioning statement: a brief sentence or two that explains how you differ from the competition. This is usually high level, and reflects the mission.
Value statement: a brief statement that signals your core principles and values and the role you play in your customers’ lives.
Unique selling points: specific reasons customers choose (or should choose) your company over your competition. These should be identified in connection with your mission, core principles, and core values.
Gap analysis: identifying opportunities where customer needs are unmet or under-served, then determining how your brand can address those gaps in a way consistent with your identity.
With purpose and positioning in place, the next pillar is understanding the people who bring the brand to life.
People
This is as much about culture as it is about customers. The collective ideology of the brand internally (the culture) should breach the walls of the company and reach across to pull the customer into that same culture for their interaction, however brief.
The outward expression of that culture, is something tackled in the brand identity — the visual and verbal expression of the brand strategy — but this all starts with culture. The first step here is knowing who we’re targeting as our ideal customer. We call this seed clients — if you were a pumpkin farmer trying to grow the most award-winning pumpkins, you would plant the seeds of last year’s award-winning pumpkins. These are seed clients — the clients we want to replicate.
To deliver a successful target customer profile, we need to understand three things about them — their demographics, psychographics, and pain points.
Demographics: Demographics are the objective, quantifiable attributes of your target customer. They describe who the customer is in factual terms — such as age, gender, income, education level, occupation, location, family status, and other measurable characteristics. Demographics help determine whether customers fit the practical criteria for your product or service.
Psychographics: Psychographics capture the internal, emotional, and behavioral attributes of your target customer. They describe why people make decisions — their values, motivations, lifestyles, interests, beliefs, attitudes, habits, and the deeper drivers behind their choices. Psychographics help you understand what your customer cares about, what they aspire to, and what influences their behavior.
Pain points: the issue they’re having that they’re looking to your company to solve. Customers often aren’t forthcoming with their reasons for purchase — there’s a lot of buyer psychology and internal dialogue that’s never verbalized, especially inside of a sales process. We have to be able to read between the lines here to add this very important element to the picture of your target customer profile.
The target customer profile is often a melding of ideas. Maybe there have been several customers who you prefer to work with, you can take bits and pieces from each to create a fictional narrative, it’s not critical that it’s entirely based in reality but you should have an idea that this client does exist and that you can deliver on their pain points.
Conclusion
Brand strategy is the foundation that shapes how your business evolves, how your team operates, and how the world understands what you offer. If brand is what people say when you’re not in the room, brand strategy is the strongest lever you have to influence that story.
With a clear strategy, your brand becomes more than design or messaging. It becomes a shared narrative — one your employees believe in, your customers connect with, and your leaders use to make confident decisions that drive growth.
