Brand strategy: the complete guide, with examples

Nearly every identity project that goes wrong goes wrong the same way: it starts with the logo. Somebody opens an editor, draws twenty marks, picks the one that looks best, and six months later discovers the brand sounds like a San Francisco startup to an audience looking for a local plumber.

Brand strategy is what prevents that. It is not a fifty-page deck and it is not something you only do with an agency budget. It is a set of five written decisions you make once and return to every time you have to choose a colour, a typeface, a headline or a reply on social media.

What brand strategy actually is

It is the written answer to: who you are, for whom, and why it should matter. That is all. Everything else (logo, colour, type, website, ads) is a translation of that answer into visual and verbal form.

The distinction people trip over: a brand is not a visual identity. The visual identity is what the brand looks like. The brand is what people think about you when you are not in the room. Strategy is the deliberate attempt to influence that thought. For the visual half, see the visual identity guide.

A useful strategy has five components. They fit on one page, and it is better if they do.

1. Audience: exactly who you are talking to

“Women 25–45, urban, mid income” is not an audience. It is the output of a demographics report and it helps you decide nothing. A useful audience is described by the situation somebody is in when they run into you.

Compare that with: “a woman who has just found out she is pregnant and is searching, at 2am, whether she can still drink coffee.” The second description tells you what tone to use, which colours are wrong, what question has to be the first thing on the page, and why long academic articles lose.

Write three or four sentences answering:

• At what moment does someone look for us? What just happened in their life?
• What are they trying to avoid? Fear is almost always a stronger motivator than desire.
• What are they comparing us with? Not only direct competitors, also “do nothing” and “do it myself”.
• What would make them distrust us? That is the brief for everything credibility-related: proof, published prices, real photographs.

2. Positioning: the space you occupy in someone's head

Positioning is one sentence that says what you are and what you are different from. The classic formula still works, because it forces you to choose:

The hard part, and the only one that really counts, is the last clause. If your reason to believe is “because we are passionate about what we do”, you do not have a position, you have a sentiment. A reason to believe has to be a real structure, a process, a guarantee, a specialism, a constraint your competitors cannot afford.

The strongest positioning tool is refusal. A photography studio that says “we shoot products only, never people” is far more memorable than one that shoots anything. Giving up a category is the most credible signal that you are good at the other one.

3. Promise: what you guarantee every time

The promise is what a customer gets no matter who serves them or on what day. It is also the filter for every campaign idea: if an ad promises something other than the brand promise, the ad is wrong, however well it performs.

A good promise is checkable. “Reliable service” cannot be checked. “We answer every message within two working hours” can, which is exactly why it builds trust. The risk is real: write it and you have to keep it. But that risk is what gives it value.

4. Personality: how you would behave as a person

Pick three to five adjectives and, for each, write the pair “we are X, but not Y”. The contrast is what makes the list usable by a designer or a copywriter.

• Direct, but not blunt.
• Warm, but not familiar, we do not use first names until invited.
• Precise, but not technical, we explain rather than impress.

That list translates straight into visual decisions. “Direct, but not blunt” means a clean grotesque, not a condensed tabloid face. “Warm, but not familiar” rules out both the pastel palette and absolute black. See how the translation works in the colour palette guide and the typography guide.

5. Tone of voice: the writing rules

Tone of voice is not a list of adjectives, it is a list of rules someone who missed the strategy meeting can apply. The best format is “we write / we do not write”, with real examples from your own material.

Four lines like that are worth more than ten pages of theory, because they are executable. You can hand them to a new collaborator on their first day.

How to check the strategy holds

Three tests, in the order worth applying them:

1. 01The opposite test. Take each statement and write its opposite. If the opposite is absurd (“we do not care about customers”), your statement says nothing. If the opposite is a position a real company could take, you have said something.
2. 02The logo-cover test. Cover your logo on your own site and drop a competitor's in. If the copy still works, the copy is not yours.
3. 03The decision test. Next time you are choosing between two designs, open the document. If it does not help you choose, it is too vague and needs rewriting.

From strategy to identity

Once you have that page, the visual work gets surprisingly fast, because every decision now has a criterion. You are no longer choosing between twenty attractive logos, you are choosing the one that says what you wrote down that you say.

That is the logic behind RHAM: you write the brief once, and the strategy, the logo, the palette, the type, the website and the campaign are generated from it, so they agree with each other by construction rather than by luck. See the modules or the plans.

And once strategy is translated into visual form, the place all of it lives is the brand guidelines.