Brand Strategy
The decisions everything else gets built on.
We help mission-driven organizations, small businesses, and independent artists develop a brand strategy that’s clear, compelling, authentic, and actionable.
Overview
Brand strategy unites all behavior, actions, and communications of your brand. It answers the questions everything downstream depends on: what’s important about your brand, what makes it different, who you need to reach, and where it’s going.
In practice, that means working out your core brand attributes, your positioning, your audiences, and your voice — and writing them down in a form your team and your external partners can actually use. Depending on what you need, it can also include competitive analysis, a messaging platform, or a manifesto.
We aim to demystify the process. A brand strategy that sits on a server and nobody knows how to apply is an expensive document; one your designer, your writer, and your next hire can each pick up and act on is something else entirely.
What this looks like in practice
— A working session with whoever holds the decisions — usually half a day, sometimes less
— Competitive analysis, where the category is crowded enough to need mapping
— Audience definition — who you’re for, and who you’re not
— Positioning and core brand attributes
— Voice and tone guidelines
— A messaging platform or manifesto, depending on the need
— A creative brief, so the design work starts from a decision rather than a mood
When you need it
— You’re launching something and everything else — the site, the packaging, the pitch — is waiting on what it should say
— You have a logo you like and no framework for the hundred decisions coming after it
— You’ve grown or changed direction, and the way you describe yourself is a few years behind
— Every team describes the organization slightly differently, and it’s starting to show
Creative Direction
A brand strategy is only as good as what gets built from it. So we often stay on through the design — writing the creative brief, finding the right design partner, and managing the process so what comes back reflects the strategy rather than drifting from it.
We've worked alongside designers and artists throughout our careers and understand the creative process from the inside. That's what makes this work: we can brief a designer in terms they can actually use, and explain the result back to a client in terms they can act on. The gap between those two is where most design projects go wrong.
For Zack's Mighty, that meant briefing a Brooklyn design studio and writing the copy that went on the bag. We don't design. We make sure the designers have what they need, and we keep the work honest to the thinking.
FAQ
I have a logo and typefaces and colors. Is that brand strategy?
Nope — that’s a visual identity.
Brand strategy goes beyond visuals to articulate your vision, audiences, personality, core values, how you do business, and how you communicate. The identity is how it looks. The strategy is what it means and who it’s for.
When do you need brand strategy?
Brand strategy should be developed before beginning any visual identity work.
It’s the document a designer needs to create something that actually expresses the brand, rather than guessing at it. That said, plenty of clients arrive with a newly designed logo and no strategy behind it. We can work that way too — it just means doing in reverse what would have been easier forward.
Isn’t brand strategy just a buzz word?
It can be.
Ours isn’t, because we hand over practical things you can use on day one — the positioning you can say in your own voice, the brief a designer can work from, the voice guidelines a new hire can follow when writing content.
If it sits on a server and no one knows how to bring it to life, it wasn’t worth doing.
Featured Work
“Megan took all of our ideas and formed them into something coherent and comprehensive. The process clarified our thinking and added new facets to our project that we couldn't figure out how to develop on our own. Thoughtful, thorough — she’s really, really good at this.”
— SARA CLUGAGE, CO-FOUNDER, SUB ROSA HOUSEFeatured Package
Build Your Brand Strategy
Who you’re for, what you stand for, and how you sound — worked out before anyone designs a logo or writes a line of copy. Built for individuals, small businesses, and nonprofits that need the foundation in place and don’t have a communications department to build it.
You end up with something your designer, your writer, and your next hire can each pick up and use without translation. A strategy nobody can apply is an expensive document.
Learn more about our Brand Strategy package >
Let’s talk.
Find out if we are the right communications experts for your needs.