- Brand Strategy
The brand strategy bible: What it is and how to build one
Jump to:
What is a brand strategy?
Your company’s success isn’t based on luck or coincidence. If you want to continuously grow and thrive, you need a solid brand strategy.
A brand strategy outlines your business’ unique approach to branding and marketing. It’s an important tool that helps you set yourself apart from your competitors; guides your actions and decisions toward long-term goals; and, ultimately, drives more awareness, loyalty, and profit to your brand.
Defining concepts
Brand strategy vs. brand identity
In common use, the word “brand”(opens in a new tab or window) is almost synonymous with “brand identity(opens in a new tab or window)”, referring to the names, products, services, logos, taglines, color palettes, images, experiences, perceptions, and other qualities someone might associate with your business or organization.
If a brand identity is who and what you are, then a branding strategy is the why and how you will bring that brand to life. It establishes a blueprint that encompasses several key business elements, including but not limited to:
- What perceptions about your brand do you want to foster among internal and external stakeholders
- How do you plan to meaningfully differentiate yourself from other brands in the same space
- What messaging is most optimal for communicating those differences and reaching your target audience
Brand strategy vs. marketing strategy
Branding and marketing go hand-in-hand, and the former typically contains a roadmap for the latter, but they’re not the same thing.
A branding strategy focuses on long-term goals such as shaping public perception of the brand, creating an emotional connection with your customers, and fostering loyalty. Meanwhile, a marketing strategy deals with the implementation and execution of your brand strategy to achieve more immediate business objectives, such as pushing sales for a particular product line, building awareness for social responsibility initiatives, gaining more leads, or increasing engagement on social media(opens in a new tab or window).
Basically, think of a brand plan (which covers your core values and brand positioning) as the foundation for your marketing (which includes content, PR, and campaigns).
Why is brand strategy important?
We live in a world where businesses are competing for everyone’s attention at every touch point. It’s in the ads that pop up in the middle of your favorite shows, the algorithm that serves you relevant social media content, and even word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family. Nielsen Media estimates that there are over half a million brands in the world(opens in a new tab or window)—the market is simply oversaturated, and it’s on you to stand out, and stay top of mind.
The importance of brand strategy isn’t speculative; its effect on consumer behavior and financial performance has been proven over and over again by research. Effective brand building(opens in a new tab or window) strategies can translate to:
- Brand awareness: A cornerstone of brand strategy, brand awareness is key to establishing your presence and building trust with consumers. Salsify’s 2025 Consumer Research Report(opens in a new tab or window) found that 87% of customers spend more on brands they trust.
- Brand equity: Positive brand equity has been associated with key performance indicators like increased profitability(opens in a new tab or window), sales(opens in a new tab or window), market share(opens in a new tab or window), and command over pricing.
- Stability: During the COVID-19 market crash, top brands consistently outperformed others significantly, experiencing higher returns, lower stock risk, and increased stock prices(opens in a new tab or window).
- Retention: Good brand strategies cultivate long-term loyalty. One major defining factor? The customer service experience, which accounted for 71.7% of variation in retention(opens in a new tab or window), according to a 2015 study published in the International Journal of Managerial Studies and Research.
What are the key elements of a brand strategy?
The details of your brand strategy are unique to you—what works for a personal brand(opens in a new tab or window) may not work for a brand overhaul(opens in a new tab or window)—but the elements of a brand strategy are generally universal. When creating a brand strategy, tailor each of these elements to the specific needs of your industry, niche, and audience.
Purpose and mission
When you lead with purpose(opens in a new tab or window), you’re communicating to your consumers that you care about more than just profit. You are showing that you also care about your impact on the world. Perhaps you’re a coffee shop that wants to promote local agriculture and sustainability, or an employer that highly values diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
Whatever your specific purpose is, it’s what will set you apart from the rest. Everything else in your brand strategy will flow naturally from your fundamental principles, and customers will reward your authenticity. A 2024 Ipsos poll has shown that 7 out of 10 consumers want to buy from brands that reflect their personal values(opens in a new tab or window).
Target audience
Knowing your customer requires deep research, not just into their demographics but their psychology. Look into what influences their behavior, what emotions they want to feel, and what needs they want to meet. When you understand who you’re doing this for, you can better pinpoint what products or services you should offer, what messaging resonates with them most, and where you can best reach them.
Brand positioning
Brand building doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Unless you’ve created a never-before-seen technology or a groundbreaking product, you’re likely entering an industry that has established brands and plenty of competition. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—you don’t have to be the only brand in a space, as long as you can communicate what makes you different from everyone else. Positioning is what makes you competitive, instead of just another player in an already crowded market.
Messaging and tone of voice
Your brand voice reflects your brand’s personality and values, defining how you “sound” in internal and external communications. This covers word choice, grammar, style, and messaging based on different contexts. Whether it’s fun, playful, serious, authoritative, exciting, sophisticated, sincere, casual, approachable, or a unique combination of the above, what matters most is that you’re consistent both to your brand values and across different touchpoints.
Visual identity
While it would be nice not to judge a book by its cover, we can’t deny that tangible, visual expressions of your brand send a message. Research shows that humans are highly visual creatures(opens in a new tab or window). Our brains process images much faster than we do words, often relying on these cues to make judgments and adjust our behavior.
Your visual identity is essential to communicating who you are to your consumers. This includes elements such as your logo(opens in a new tab or window) (arguably, the most recognizable symbol of your brand), colors(opens in a new tab or window), fonts(opens in a new tab or window), images, and other graphic design(opens in a new tab or window).
Brand strategy examples by context
Brand building strategies must be adapted depending on the market, sector, and specific context, goals, and challenges of your business. For example, while most brand strategy discussions are centered around B2C applications, involving the influencing of consumer perceptions, emotional branding techniques, and leveraging influencer markets to reach target demographics, they are equally critical in B2B markets, where trust, connection, and strong relationships are paramount.
Let’s take a look at how brand strategy considerations may differ across contexts:
B2C
- Objectives: Influence perception, build emotional connection, drive sales, foster loyalty
- Audience: Individual consumers
- Tactics: Emotional branding, influencer marketing, personality, digital engagement, storytelling
- Challenges: Maintaining authenticity, managing online reputation, standing out in a cluttered market
B2B
- Objectives: Establish trust, credibility, expertise
- Audience: Organizations, key business decision-makers
- Tactics: Relationship marketing, content/expertise marketing, demonstrating reliability
- Challenges: Reaching decision-makers, demonstrating ROI, longer sales cycles
Education
- Objectives: Attract students, improve reputation, engage alumni, build community
- Audience: Prospective and current students, parents, alumni, faculty, staff
- Tactics: Positioning, showcasing programs/facilities, promoting student experience, social media, targeted advertising, identity (school colors, mascot)
- Challenges: Competition, appealing to diversity, managing reputation, demonstrating value
SME
- Objectives: Differentiate from local competitors, build customer loyalty
- Audience: Local community, niche consumer segments
- Tactics: Defining values, local SEO, social media, community building, loyalty programs, word-of-mouth
- Challenges: Limited resources, competition with larger enterprises, and initial awareness
Employer
- Objectives: Attract, engage, and retain talent
- Audience: Potential and current employees
- Tactics: Defining values, internal communication, recruitment, marketing, and employee experience management
- Challenges: Talent shortages, competition, aligning internal reality with external image, measuring ROI, evolving employee expectations
Download your brand strategy template pack
Build a clearer, stronger brand strategy with 8 ready-to-use Canva templates—from positioning maps to go-to-market plans and competitor analysis.
- Craft a clear brand strategy
- Plan and launch products faster
- Visualise your brand positioning
- Understand your market and customers
- Create content that aligns with your brand
How to build a brand strategy
The process of creating a strong brand strategy requires a lot of research, effort, and collaboration across teams. Now that you understand the importance and elements of one, it’s time to go through this step by step guide on how to create a brand strategy:
The first, and perhaps most important, step is to establish your core philosophy. When in doubt, you’ll always return to these.
Simon Sinek, author of “Start With Why”, said in his TED talk in 2009(opens in a new tab or window), “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”
Key questions to consider
- Why does your brand exist?
- Why do you do what you do?
- Who do you want to be to your customers?
- What qualities do you want people to think of when they think of your brand?
- What problems do you want to solve for your customers?
Conducting consumer and market research can help you better understand the existing business landscape, which is how you’ll best be able to position yourself for success. In your gap(opens in a new tab or window) or competitor analysis(opens in a new tab or window), identify what’s currently being done, and who are the other players vying for your customers’ attention.
As for your audience analysis, while it may be tempting to cast as wide a net as possible, this isn’t just impossible—it’s counterproductive. Sinek continues, “The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.” This means, of course, that you’ll have a narrower target, but those who buy in are much more likely to be loyal customers.
People make purchasing decisions based on a confluence of factors, such as their age, gender, income, location, interests, and environment.
When you have a good grasp of who you’re selling to, it’ll be much easier to design your brand identity and communications around what resonates with them the most.
Key questions to consider
- Who are our competitors? What do they offer?
- What strategies and channels do our competitors use to differentiate themselves in the market?
- Who are you trying to reach with your products or services? What is your ideal customer profile?
- What matters to your consumers? Why do they choose certain products or brands over others?
- What are the ideal behaviors you want to inspire in your target consumer group? What emotions or triggers drive them to act?
As the eventual winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 6, Bianca del Rio succinctly put it, “Let me ask you a very fair question: what do you do successfully? Quickly.” While it may sound harsh, if you can’t articulate concisely what makes you different from your competitors, your customers won’t be able to, either.
In one or two sentences, write down what your brand’s unique value is. Maybe you develop a larger product range that caters to a wider demographic. Maybe it’s the opposite, where you provide a very specific solution to a very specific problem. Maybe you have cheaper pricing, more responsive customer service, or a longer warranty. Or maybe what you’re offering is not just a product but a community, too.
Key questions to consider
- How would customers perceive our product or brand?
- What is the greatest benefit or impact of our product?
- What do our competitors do? What do we do differently or better?
Even without a design background, you can develop powerful branding concepts. Begin by curating a draft mood board(opens in a new tab or window) that encapsulates your brand's core identity, then expand upon it.
Don’t undermine the power of your instincts—choosing the right colors(opens in a new tab or window) or fonts(opens in a new tab or window) can evoke certain emotions(opens in a new tab or window), even if you don’t quite understand the science behind it. For example, sleek graphic elements with neutral colors and serif typography? That communicates chic, sophisticated, and premium. Meanwhile, a colorful palette with rounded letters and maximalist illustrations? That screams fun, accessible, and maybe even kid-friendly.
Key questions to consider
- What colors, shapes, and fonts best convey our brand values, personality, and positioning?
- How do our visual identity elements make our customers feel?
Brand guidelines set clear rules for portraying your brand across various media, ensuring consistency no matter where your customers interact with you. This playbook can get quite granular, specifying specific colors, font styles, spacing, and the do’s and don’ts of your visual identity.
Make it even easier for you and your team by creating brand templates(opens in a new tab or window), which speed up content creation and help you avoid costly branding mistakes.
Key questions to consider
- What are the hex codes, RGB, or CMYK for the brand colors?
- What colors can be mixed and how?
- When and where can certain visual identity elements be used?
- Where do we source assets such as stock photos, videos, illustrations, and graphics?
- In what ways can designers play around with the visual identity? Where is it more limited?
- What accessibility considerations do we keep in mind?
Building a brand development strategy isn’t a one-and-done task. Everything—your products, your customers, the world around you—is in constant flux. Leaving room for flexibility and growth allows your brand to adapt to these changes and stay strong and profitable.
To do this effectively, you need to establish metrics by which you’ll measure your success. This can vary depending on your business goals and niche, but a few common ones include:
- Brand recall and recognition
- Website traffic
- Social media engagement (e.g., impressions, follows, etc.)
- Sales or profitability
- Customer retention and satisfaction
- PR and media mentions
- Competitor performance
When refreshing your brand marketing strategy(opens in a new tab or window), you’ll want to identify where your strategies are no longer working (even if they’ve worked before), address your weaknesses, and reinforce your strengths.
Questions
- How has our brand been performing based on our chosen key performance indicators?
- What new trends, markets, problems, or technologies have emerged since we started?
- Where is the industry headed now?
- What experiences (e.g., website) could be optimized for a more satisfying customer journey?
Brand strategy best practices
With clear values, extensive market research, a carefully crafted brand positioning statement, and set brand guidelines, you too can build a brand strategy on your own. Maximize your efforts and make it easy to scale your brand by keeping these branding best practices in mind.
Keep your brand consistent across touchpoints
Just as frequently altering your company's strategic direction or public image can obscure its identity to even your most loyal stakeholders, inconsistent branding will confuse your customers, erode trust, weaken your impact, and ultimately harm your brand.
Use your brand guidelines as an anchor. Maintain consistency everywhere customers can engage with you—this includes your website, social media, events, packaging, advertising, customer service, and more.
Involve key stakeholders
For a brand strategy to work, you need your entire organization (from the very top of the C-suite level to the very foundations of your workforce) to be aligned on your purpose, objectives, and directives.
One of the best ways to ensure brand consistency is to involve the different teams and stakeholders in the strategy process. Get their feedback on how your brand makes them feel and what they can do to recreate that emotional experience with your customers. Communicate clearly on your “why”, offering training and resources where needed. Empower employees by showing them how the brand strategy helps them meet their role’s specific targets and how they contribute to your brand’s overall success.
Create an emotional connection
Maslow's hierarchy of needs categorizes human needs, progressing from basic physiological and safety requirements to more complex psychological needs such as belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. This framework suggests that while fundamental survival needs are primary, human motivation is also significantly influenced by intangible emotions.
Likewise, consumer behavior is largely driven by the desire to feel specific emotions, like belongingness, prestige, excitement, novelty, and independence. If you can find a way to tap into that and integrate it into your brand strategy, studies show that it’s much more effective at increasing loyalty, building long-term relationships, and improving purchase intent(opens in a new tab or window).
Strengthening your brand through strategy
A brand strategy isn’t just a thought exercise or obstacle you have to overcome before you can do business—it’s a holistic, long-term plan that integrates all of the different parts of your brand.
By setting the foundations for your identity, values, and positioning, you can achieve meaningful differentiation in an oversaturated market while also cultivating strong, loyal, and, ultimately, profitable relationships with your stakeholders. Done right, it creates a clear roadmap for your brand, grounds your decisions in your core principles, and helps you better serve the customers you’re doing this for.
Was this page helpful?
Ready-to-use templates to grow your brand strategy
