Steps to creating a brand strategy for long-term success

If you’re after something jazzy or dripping in consultant jargon, I may disappoint. Nor is this likely to be the place for mood boards (as much as I love them), brand matrices, or the dreaded brand archetype wheel. 

This is about getting to the point.

Although I’ll now deftly – and, yes, ironically – sidestep that intro by adding a bit of meaty context to unpack what I mean. Because it’s needed.

Zen and the Art of Brand Simplicity

I don’t know about you, but my headspace (or “bandwidth” if you’re in work mode) is shrinking by the hour. Too many messages. Too many emails. Too many browser tabs open, literally and figuratively. Add in the school run, the endless stream of meetings, and that guilt-ridden hour plundering YouTube wormholes… you get the picture. 

If among all of this you tried to get me to read a 55-page strategy deck and digest it all, I’d have… let’s call them thoughts.

I need Zen-like simplicity. Or otherwise – quite simply – nothing will actually stick.

And I rather suspect I’m not alone in this. You, me, the intern, the CEO – we’re all just busy people trying to keep up with modern life. 

So simplicity isn’t a luxury. It’s a prerequisite, and a good brand strategy, therefore, must be simple. 

Simple enough for anyone to follow. Writing one isn’t about inspiration – it’s about discipline. It should fit on a page. Because if a strategy takes 55 pages to conclude, we probably don’t have a strategy, we’ve got… vibes.

I once worked on a drinks brand with some very clever people. The brand challenge? Make a single thought or condensed brand narrative stick in the mind of a Californian retailer, a bartender in Taipei and a distribution middleman somewhere in between, all while several hundred other brands attempt to do the exact same thing.

Half of the people in this chain didn’t even use PowerPoint. Most wouldn’t read past a paragraph. The idea had to live in a sales sheet or an Instagram DM. 

Strategy, in this sense, becomes the art of bottling a lightning bolt into a sentence. And oddly enough, that constraint made everything sharper. 

So here it is. A guide to writing a simple brand strategy for the long haul. One grounded in your customer, your company, competitors, and is defined by a simple positioning on a page. I’m going to make the assumptions you know what a brand is – the collection of things that exist in your customer’s head when they think about your company. And honestly? None of this ought to be radical. That’s the point. It’s taught in business schools across the world. The method hasn’t changed at all in decades.

The problem, predictably, is us – humans, or more specifically marketers. We’re always chasing the new, the shiny, a dollop of fad, shoe-horning in a great idea we read on Substack. Always layering on sparkle. Because, as Frasier Crane puts it to his brother Niles: “Ah, but if less is more, just imagine how much more more would be.”

So, back to basics. 

Step 1: Speak to Your Customers

We marketers often suffer from a tragic misunderstanding of narrative roles. Brands cast themselves as the protagonist – swashbuckling into the customer’s inbox with heroic flair to save the day. But your customer probably doesn’t care. Like you, they’re also busy. They’re maybe tired. They, in fact, are the hero.

We need to understand who they are, what they care about, what they buy – and why they bother.

But first make the hard call: who out of the grand universe of total potential customers are we going to focus on, versus those who are not just yet a priority. This becomes the audience to which you position your brand and focus your efforts.

To be honest, that’s a whole article in itself – research, targeting, segments, and all the usual marketing theatre. But let’s keep it to the point: your budget isn’t infinite, so your audience can’t be either. You need a target or two, broad enough that they will drive growth over the next few years (this is something you can always revisit), but narrow enough, with enough commonalities, to give strategic focus. 

Then you need to understand the key tension: what do those people really care about?

To start off our process, we clutch our spade and dig for information, in a series of interviews. What’s driving people? What are their pain points? Their routines, fears, hopes, hangovers? When are they in buying mode and entering the category? Add to that ethnography, firmographic (same thing but B2B and fancier-sounding) insight, surveys, desk research, behavioural data – the works. We need to find out as much as we can.

We talk to customers not just about a product, but about their life or, in the B2B world, their work life. It’s harder than you think. We’re all buried under emails, so we rarely really hear them. That’s why we spend hours talking to our clients’ customers to kick off any research project. They say the most surprising, useful, human things – and your champions often hold the juiciest insights. Customer surveys can give you the blunt edge of reality too. Take it all. Sift it. Find patterns.

Step 2: Pin Down What You Do Especially Well 

Next, it’s time to look inwards. But this isn’t the moment for lofty manifestos, and we’re certainly not here to detail how a founder had an epiphany in a WeWork toilet and decided to reinvent the intricacies of invoice management, interesting though that detail may be.

It’s about unearthing the things that you’re genuinely good at – and you will be very good at something.

So this is the second thing we look at as part of any brand project, and it comes with some key questions about your business. 

What you have the credibility and capability to deliver. What do you do that no one else can do as well as us? Where do you already win? What do you stand for, and can we prove it? How and where are you distinctive and doing something relatively different to others? This will apply to any industry or sector, from Saas to manufacturing. 

We need hard truths here. Because if you position yourself around something aspirational that you’re not operationally capable of delivering, that won’t necessarily land well with your customers.

Step 3: Examine Your Enemies

Finally, turn your gaze like young Skywalker on the dunes of Tatooine – scanning the horizon for movement, trouble, opportunity. What’s the Empire building while you’re still tinkering with your lightsaber?

This is less about SWOTs and more about strategic contrast and finding some chunky white spaces. Who owns what in the market? How do they position themselves? What are they weak at? And perhaps importantly from a creative and messaging point of view, collectively, what are they all saying? What are their shared characteristics, the headlines and buzzwords? Because saying similar things will end up contributing to the same noise, rather than being distinctive – and noticed. 

More importantly, what are they not saying? 

What we’re not looking to do is copy anyone. Instead we’re looking for the gap in which we can credibly plant your flag. Not a gap for the sake of it – a gap that matters to your customer and that you can really own. 

To paraphrase the famous brand guru Marty Neumeier, your brand should seek to zig where others zag – but only if it matters to your customer.

Step 4: Cultural Considerations

I want to caveat this massively with: this is not the time for brand purpose. A purpose is a separate thing, often something to rally around internally and, if authentic, comes at a cost because it’s a sacrifice you believe in (i.e. Patagonia and the planet). Maybe it even forms a great story as part of campaign work. 

But it’s not part of a good old fashioned brand strategy, and is unlikely to lead to a strong uptick in adoption of your cloud-based software, or sell more car parts to manufacturers.   

I’m merely talking about culture – the mood of the moment. Not in a bandwagon sense, but in an anthropological one. People don’t make decisions in a vacuum. They make them in the swirling context of politics (this is probably the most sensitive) media, expectations and vibes. So consider the broader world in which we operate, and what it might mean for your strategic choices. 

If you don’t read the room, you risk becoming the cautionary tale in someone else’s keynote.

Step 5: Triangulation 

Here’s where strategy all comes together. First let’s look at a couple of the publicly available templates from some of the world’s most widely known universities. 

Harvard Business School: For [target market], our brand is the only one among all [competitive set] that [unique value claim or primary point of difference] because [reasons to believe].

Cornell University:  For [target market], the [brand] is the [point of differentiation] among all [frame of reference] because [reason to believe].

There are a number of ways to cut this, but essentially your research now gets boiled down. We don’t want watery sauce, we want thick, flavourful, impactful, high-calorie nourishment. 

My preferred approach to creating a positioning statement comes from the guru of all marketing gurus, Mark Ritson – because it’s simpler than the above: 

This is what you do really well, in a way that’s relatively different to your competitors, and is something your customers actually care about. 

Write it however you fancy, but positioning your brand is basically the meeting of those three things. 

Your brand positioning statement might sound dry, rather than a slick tagline, and that’s exactly what it needs to be. But it guides everything from comms to product to internal culture. It’s not for external audiences – you wouldn’t share your battle plan, after all. It’s for your team, your partners. It needs to be as sharp and functional as this, because it will need buy-in from your whole company to really land. Remember what I said about the 55-page strategy? We’re down to a line.

It fits in an email or a DM. You can brief it to a creative team and they’ll get it. It’s easy to say convincingly across the boardroom table. You can describe what you do to your family in a way that doesn’t involve the cold reality of sighing: “I do emails”. 

A Note On Distinction

Let’s be clear – brand strategy and differentiation is one thing. But brand distinctiveness? Well that’s another game entirely, and very important it is too. 

Cue Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. This is the realm of mental and physical availability – of salience. This is where we layer strategy over distinctive assets: Pantone colours, sonic branding, logos, language. These create the obscure-sounding phrase of “memory structures”, which is actually important, because these are the things that essentially trigger your brand in the real world, if you’re lucky enough to be thought about at the moment someone enters the category. It’s why you can recognise a Guinness advert without the logo. 

It’s a marvellous rabbit hole for another day, but sits alongside strategy as the “things people bring to mind about your brand without releasing they’re actually thinking about your brand”.

Final Strategy Tips

• Clarity is not the enemy of creativity. The tighter the strategy, the clearer the brief, the wilder the ideas.
  
• Strategy isn’t democracy. Listen widely, but decide narrowly. Courage builds brands, not consensus.
  
• Keep it boring. Save the sparkle for the activation.
  

The Not-A-Commercial-Strategy

I should caveat all of this by saying that brand strategy doesn’t float in some commercial ether, untethered from reality; it sits shoulder to shoulder with your commercial strategy. Ideally with a drink in hand and the cool confidence that it’s not just here for the mood boards. It backs your sales team, letting them know they won’t be fighting fires forever because you have a plan. 

Commercially there might need to set some crystal clear objectives, budgets; are you trying to grow penetration in a crowded market, command a price premium, stretch into a new category, or simply stop churn? 

Now, I’ve deliberately kept that bit light here – not because I’m holding it back for some sequel, but because I think commercial strategy is, in its own way, beautifully complicated, a baroque cathedral of trade-offs and tensions. But a brand strategy isn’t the full orchestral score – it’s the hummable tune you carry in your head when the room gets noisy. The shorthand. The compass pointing you where to go. The thing you reach for when the rest of the business starts spinning off into chaos. 

This is really about getting to a simple truth. It shouldn’t feel profoundly radical – if it did, there’s probably something a bit iffy. A good strategy, in my view, should feel like it was there all along – like the best ideas, people might be wondering, “Well, why didn’t I think of that?”

Be Like Picasso

Brand strategy isn’t about inspiration, it’s about making choices in order to arrive at simplicity, and a positioning that very busy people can understand in a few seconds. By saying no to the many, many distracting ideas – including brand purpose for the moment – you’ll end up saying something that actually starts to make a difference day to day, year to year.

What’s more you’ll have something you can genuinely communicate, that expresses what you do really well, that gets across how and why you’re different, and you’ll know that it is something the target market genuinely cares about. 

When you show it to someone, they might not realise the hard work that led to a simple conclusion. This reminds me about the great artist Picasso: a woman approached him, so the story goes, in a café (or a restaurant, or a park, depending on who you ask), and asked him to sketch something on a napkin. 

He obliged with a few swift strokes, and when she asked how much it would cost, he said something audacious like: 

“That will be ten thousand francs.” 

She was gobsmacked. “But it only took you thirty seconds!” 

To which Picasso replied, “No, it took me forty years.”