How to Create a Brand Strategy

What is a brand?

A "brand" can be defined in a million different ways. When people talk about a "brand," they usually mean the physical mark (or logo) imprinted on something to identify the company that made it A brand, however, is more than just a physical mark. It's an emotional mark—specifically, an emotional experience that is strengthened or weakened with each interaction with that company.

What is a Brand strategy?

According to branding expert Marty Neumeier, a brand strategy is "a plan for the systematic development of a brand in alignment with a business strategy."

A brand strategy helps you understand who you are and serves as a blueprint for communicating that identity.

Our brand strategy process is divided into three stages. We walk you through the process of developing your Brand Heart (the core of your brand), articulating your Brand Messaging (how you talk about who you are), and creating your Visual Identity (the visual expression of your brand). By the end, you'll have a complete brand strategy, summarised in new brand guidelines to assist you in bringing your brand to life.

The beginning of our brand strategy

We began doing brand strategy work a few years ago after encountering a number of clients who came to us for content strategy work but couldn't articulate who they were or what they were really trying to We quickly realized they required more than just content assistance; they required a complete brand realignment. We were eager to assist them, but we also had two major realizations.

Working on brand strategy appears to be extremely complicated—but it should not be. Once we started learning more about brand strategy, we ran into so many schools of thought, conflicting perspectives, and outdated exercises. We'd have to create a simple framework for our partners if we wanted to provide them with one.

We didn’t know our own brand as well as we thought we did. The more we looked into our clients' brand issues, the more we realized we were dealing with many of the same problems. We'd have to be the guinea pig and test the brand strategy framework on ourselves first if we wanted to confidently guide our clients through it.