Brand strategy that might kill a sacred cow (or several).

A positioning strategy document, brand narrative, value proposition, and an activation roadmap. The strategy document is the one most clients say changed how they think about the business. It covers the diagnosis, where you compete, who you’re for, what you offer that nobody else can, and the coordinated set of moves to take it to market. It’s a decision-making tool.

We don’t hand over a lofty positioning document and wish you luck. The strategy has to survive under scrutiny: what happens to the current revenue, what are the second and third order impacts, and what does the transition actually look like.

We’ll look at it honestly. If the positioning is strong and the diagnosis holds up, we’ll tell you and move straight into identity or whatever the next phase is. If it doesn’t hold up, we’ll tell you that too. We’ve inherited strategy documents that were beautifully written and strategically empty, and we’ve seen scrappy one-pagers from founders that nailed the positioning.

Yes, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. The structural tension in most repositioning work is that the money funding the change comes from the positioning you’re trying to escape. We name that tension explicitly and build the strategy around it. That might mean a phased transition, a refusal posture that’s introduced gradually, or an architecture that lets the existing revenue continue while the new positioning builds proof. The strategy has to account for the real business, not just the aspirational one.

It probably will. You ready?

The diagnosis usually reveals something messy about the current brand, that if we just solved that one thing it will make everything else easier. We’ve seen our fair share of ‘sacred cows’ that the leadership team is attached to too. We name these tensions explicitly because a strategy that avoids the uncomfortable parts isn’t a strategy.

Have you noticed you charge more without losing buyers? Is the sales cycle shortening? Is customer acquisition getting cheaper? Are better candidates arriving unprompted?

If any of those are happening, then the strategy is working.

Honestly? We think they’re the same thing. Brand strategy is just business strategy through the lens of how the market perceives you. You can’t separate how the business competes from how the brand is perceived. If your brand strategist doesn’t understand your P&L and the actual operational and commercial needs of the business, they’re not doing strategy.

In simple terms, brand strategy is more business strategy than marketing or creative strategy, It is the game of perception and reputation, and marketing strategy is the game of persuasion and promotion.

Brand strategy is about crafting perception and coalescing a company’s reputation into a position that serves the business. It is about defining where the brand competes, who the brand is for, what can the brand own that nobody else can, and what reputation we want to leave with them.

Marketing strategy is about persuasion. Good marketing strategy is the work of getting the specific group of people you care about to first recognise that this thing is for them, and then creating the conditions where those people want to both buy from that company and remark about the brand to the people whose opinions they also care about.

We do the brand strategy, the positioning, the narrative, the identity, and the creative system that carries it into the world. We don’t do marketing strategy, nor do we do the tactical side of marketing including media buying, SEO retainers, or content calendars, and we’d rather send you to someone good for those than pretend they’re our thing. But the brand strategy work we do gives marketing something worth amplifying.

Usually four to six sessions, sometimes fewer if the business is straightforward or the CEO already has a clear view of the problem. We’ve run engagements with a single workshop where the diagnosis was obvious and the positioning just needed to be made explicit. We’ve also run up to eight where the business had multiple verticals and sub-brands, or competing stakeholder views.

The people in the room matter more than the number of sessions. We need senior decision-makers who understand the business, can make calls, and won’t need to seek approval from someone who wasn’t there. If the person signing off on the strategy isn’t in the workshops, we end up presenting to someone who has none of the context and all of the opinions. That kills momentum and usually dilutes the work.

For identity and creative phases we work with a smaller group and check in at defined approval points. The process is collaborative but structured. We don’t run things by committee.

Depends on what’s actually going on. If the business is clear on where it competes, who it’s for, and what it offers that nobody else can, and the identity just hasn’t kept pace, then a rebrand is the right scope. We do that.

If the positioning is hazy, if you’re competing on price when you shouldn’t be, or if leadership can’t agree on why someone should choose you over the next competitor, that’s a strategy problem.

We’ll tell you which situation you’re in. We’d rather have that conversation before a proposal than discover it halfway through a branding phase where everyone’s wondering why the work isn’t landing.

It’s the territory you occupy in the market, and in the mind of those people you’re trying to orbit as a brand. Owning a territory means that for the people making a decision between you and something else, there is something about that brand they can’t get from someone else. That could be functional territory or emotional territory.

You know a brand is positioned well when people stop comparing it on the lowest common denominator, which is price.

A surprising amount of brand strategy is just getting a leadership team to commit to what the company is not for. The ones who struggle with positioning are usually trying to hold onto too many mediocre territories rather than trying to win in one, because letting go of any of them feels like leaving revenue on the table. There are usually sacred cows that come up in every strategy engagement, and generally the clients we work with know they’re paying a tax on a sacred cow and benefit from a strategy agency coming in to create the gumption to pull on the leverage points that will create the most disproportionate amount of value … even if it means killing a few sacred cows along the way.

It’s portfolio strategy: deciding which brands sit under the roof, how they relate to each other, and what job each one does in the market.

It usually becomes a conversation when a company is expanding into new verticals, acquiring other businesses, or launching products that probably don’t fit the current brand. The more you try to stretch one brand across multiple categories, the more competitors you’re up against and undermines the ability of a brand to command a premium.

There are a handful of established models: branded houses, house of brands, and hybrids, and the right one depends on whether the verticals share an audience, whether the brand has permission to stretch into the new category, and whether the positioning holds up across all of them. If it doesn’t, you either design the architecture to give each vertical its own positioning, or you drop the ones that aren’t creating a force multiplier for the whole group of companies.

A brand guidelines document tells people how to use the identity, including the logo, the colours, the type, the spacing. It’s a consistency tool and we produce one as part of every identity engagement. That’s not what brand strategy is.

Brand strategy is business strategy. It’s the set of decisions about where the brand competes, who it’s for, what it can own that competitors can’t, and how it outmanoeuvres them. It should make clear how the brand creates preference, earns pricing power, and wins a specific territory in the market. A guidelines document doesn’t do any of that. It tells you which Pantone to use.

The confusion usually starts because someone puts a purpose statement, a mission, a vision, and a set of values into the front of the guidelines document and charged that work as strategy. Now the company has a PDF that looks like it covers both the strategic thinking and the identity rules, and everyone assumes the brand work is done. It’s not. A purpose statement in a guidelines doc is not a competitive strategy.

The number of companies that hand us a guidelines PDF and tell us they’ve “done brand strategy” is staggering. Sometimes they’ve confused the tool for the thinking. And sometimes an agency called it strategy to justify the fee and delivered a branding system with a purpose statement stapled to page 3 and those companies have rules for how the brand looks but no competitive logic for why it behaves that way or what it’s supposed to do for the business.

A brand narrative is the organising centre that connects why the company exists, who it’s for, what it’s trying to change, and why that matters to the people it wants to orbit around the brand. When it’s working, it gives everyone in the business a story they can repeat, use to make decisions, and use to decline the opportunities that don’t fit. It should travel through the corridors of the company.

Most brand narratives are written to make the company sound admirable, maybe a little altruistic, and they get used as a motivating device even though everyone in the building quietly knows it’s disconnected from reality. A well known example of a company that got too airy fairy is WeWork, whose mission was to “to elevate the world’s consciousness” … they rented desks. It’s very common for brands to wrap moralising language to attract customers, talent or venture capital funding.

The narrative usually (but not always) happens alongside positioning work. They develop in parallel because figuring out what territory the brand owns and figuring out how to tell that story are rarely separate conversations. The test is whether the narrative actually changes what the business does, or only changes what the business says. If you could remove the narrative entirely and the company would operate identically, it’s probably just empty moralising. A strong narrative shapes product decisions, hiring, pricing, partnerships, and what the company refuses to do.

Figures out how a company wins and builds the plan to make it happen. That’s the short version.

The longer version is that a brand strategist sits across the boundary between business strategy and creative strategy. The job is diagnosis first — understanding where the business actually is, what forces are applying pressure, where the positioning is weak, and what’s costing the company money, talent, or market perception.

A lot of people hear “brand strategist” and picture someone who writes purpose statements and picks mood boards. That version of the role exists, and it’s the most prevalent in the market. But a brand strategist should be translating business problems into brand decisions that have commercial impact. A business thinker, not a creative director. The two roles get conflated constantly, and they shouldn’t. If your brand strategist doesn’t understand what’s driving the P&L and the operational reality of the business, they’re not doing strategy.

The part people underestimate is the facilitation. The work that actually moves the business forward is getting a leadership team to make the decisions they’ve been circling for years. What the company is not for. Which sacred cows are costing more than they’re worth. Where the positioning is fuzzy because nobody wanted to commit to a tradeoff. A lot of the value of a strategist in the room is creating the gumption and the structure for those conversations to happen and for the decisions to actually get made.