If you’ve shopped around various design studios, you’ve no doubt encountered many have ‘brand strategy' as part of their offering. However, so often they only provide a design strategy—not an overarching brand strategy so it’s important to know what you’re getting when looking for someone to create or reposition your brand.
Brand strategy and design strategy are together, both crucial to a successful brand—they serve two different purposes.
Brand strategy is step one.
This is a comprehensive actionable plan that helps you reach long-term business goals (and the right audience) before jumping into figuring out your brand's look and feel.
It will define how your brand moves through the world. How it walks, how it talks and how it conveys your business’ essence and vision to the masses. This will involve key brand messages, value proposition, a brand architecture and a well-written brand story. It will all work together to communicate these elements with clarity.
Defining this involves collaborative workshops with business owners and key stakeholders. Here, looking at research, analyses and at any constraints that could impact the business and goals.
Ultimately, a brand strategy creates a roadmap to differentiate the brand in the market and it helps business owners make better informed decisions about what and how to communicate—compellingly—to their target audience.
A brand strategy is crafted closely beside a copywriter. It is not whipped up overnight. It is not written by someone without copywriting experience or ChatGPT with its generic repetitive tone to sound like everyone else in your market. No matter how quick and easy these routes may feel, a solid brand strategy pays dividends.
As writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry puts it,
A goal without a plan is just a wish
What’s key to remember, is that a brand strategy is not defining your brand's logo, colours or fonts—these are design elements derived from a design strategy that makes up the brand’s visual identity.
This is where the confusion starts. This is why some designers call a design strategy a brand strategy.
Design strategy is what translates the brand strategy and the business’ unique essence, into visual and experiential elements.
Done well and true to the brand strategy, these will resonate with the target audience.
Like brand strategy, a design strategy needs to include and reflect the target audiences’ wants, needs and key learnings from a competitor analysis. With these, it can produce a compelling message—visually (and perhaps, on an abstract level too).
A design strategy shouldn’t be developed without a brand strategy in place first. A brand strategy acts as a firm foundation that ensures everything you do is aligned with the company’s positioning—not pulled out of thin air and later blown around by fickle trends.
In a design strategy, you’ll also find principles for why certain fonts, colours and imagery styles are chosen—and what you should look for when adding or choosing them. These are all unique qualities that distinguish the brand visually and the elements that consumers may recognise day-to-day, as part of a company’s identity.
The design strategy will understand the business needs of the customer which is clearly expanded on in the brand strategy. It will align the design around these needs.
It’s a “connecting-the-dots” approach to implementing strategy.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Steve Jobs
The ultimate aim of a brand is to create a positive, memorable image in the consumers’ minds—all while reflecting the identity of the company or product.
If there’s no brand strategy to refer to, a designer might provide a ‘questionnaire’ to base their design direction off. However, it’s crucial to understand that this too often misrepresents itself as a brand strategy and will likely only consider a slither of the mission, values and target audience. In its place, it’s easier for a designer to make design assumptions and base design on personal preferences and trends (no matter their intentions or talent), rather than a strategic long term foundation.
Marketing assets, however, are the fun creative elements that should leverage the ever-evolving trends. These can be constantly changing, but feel like it’s an organic choice for your brand. An organic choice that’s 100% informed by your brand strategy and created through your design strategy.
Quick Fire Tips
- Understand what’s included in your branding work when selecting someone to complete a new brand design, rebrand or design project.
- Understand the difference between brand strategy and design strategy.
- It is important to know that not all designers incorporate long term strategic thinking into their design and instead follow trend-based directions.
- A brand strategy works closely beside a copywriter to ensure correct tone, messaging and language is on point.
While brand strategy and design strategies are important for any business, they are particularly important for start-ups.
One of the biggest challenges is a lack of brand awareness when entering a market.
The good news? You’ve got a clean slate to make an excellent first impression. One that sets the bar, firmly and for years to come.
In an information-saturated world, capturing the attention of customers has become increasingly challenging. Consistency in branding is what helps you cut through this clutter and become invaluable and memorable to consumers.
Then there’s the question of loyalty: an essential feeling to cultivate for strategic and financial reasons at the start-up stage.
Consistency—from your brand’s visual elements and messaging—creates the familiarity that loyalty is built from. It conveys a sense of effort, showing your brand cares.
From there, a strong emotional connection with consumers can be built. It is this community around your brand that in itself is a powerful strategy and has a significant impact on fostering loyalty and generating word-of-mouth referrals.
By developing a unique and thoughtfully-crafted brand—rather than hastily thrown together with hopes it will gain traction—startups can stand out in the market, from the get-go, instead of getting lost or overlooked.
Ultimately, building a solid brand strategy that informs the brand identity can make the difference between a startup’s success or failure—all by strategically and clearly establishing who the company is in a memorable and captivating way.
A well-defined brand strategy, a coherent brand identity and consistent visual branding are essential for building a successful brand today and in the future.
Startups and well-established businesses alike need to take branding (the not-so-invisible hand) seriously to grow long-term.
