How I approach brand strategy

Before any framework, any visual direction, any strategic document — there is a conversation. Two to four immersion sessions with the founding team. At least eight hours of talking before I touch a single slide or diagram.

The goal of this phase is not to collect ready answers. It is to generate the largest possible volume of raw material: how the team sees the current moment, what they want to leave behind, where the tensions between short and long-term vision live, and where the gaps between what they say and what they actually do are hiding.

In every project I have led, the most important strategic insight came from something said offhandedly — not from a formal answer to a direct question. A founder once described their product as "the thing that makes the professional feel like they finally have a partner, not just a tool." That sentence became the core of the entire positioning. It was said in passing. It was not in the brief.

"The most important strategic insight usually comes from what is said offhandedly — not from the formal answer to a direct question."

This is why immersion cannot be replaced by a questionnaire or a form. You need the conversation. You need the tension. You need the moment when two founders slightly disagree about who their audience really is — because that disagreement is the brand problem you are actually there to solve.

After immersion, I have a large amount of unstructured information. Ideas, contradictions, aspirations, fears, market observations, competitive frustrations. None of that is strategy yet. That is just honest material.

The next step is to organize it — not into a generic framework, but into a structure that is specific to the context of that brand. The frameworks I use are built around the actual tensions that emerged in the sessions, not around a standard template applied to every client.

Then comes the most important and least visible part of the work: filtering and prioritizing.

Not every idea raised in immersion becomes a brand decision. In one project, the founders wanted to emphasize their technical superiority as a competitive differentiator. After mapping the landscape, I showed them that every competitor was making the same claim. The real differentiator was not in the technology — it was in the relationship the product built with the professional. That insight required discarding something the founders were proud of. That is the work.

"Part of the strategy is deciding what stays out. Knowing what a brand will not say is as defining as knowing what it will."

I have never seen a brand strategy that worked by addressing only one of these layers. They operate together, and the failure of one compromises the others.

01. Positioning

Where the brand stands in relation to the market. What it deliberately is not. What makes it structurally harder to replicate than a product feature.

Positioning is not a tagline. It is the decision that makes a tagline possible. It answers: why would someone choose this brand over every alternative, including the alternative of doing nothing?

A well-defined positioning has a clear "not this" component. In one project, defining what the brand was not — not aggressive with competitors, not using technical jargon with its core audience, not selling by feature lists — was as clarifying as defining what it was.

02. Personality

How the brand behaves in communication. What principles guide every message. What the brand would never say, even if it could.

Personality is not tone of voice. It is the set of values that makes a consistent tone of voice possible. When the system works, you can give any new piece of communication to someone who has never worked on the brand, and they will instinctively know if it sounds right or not.

The test I use: write two versions of the same message — one in the brand's voice, one in the "average" voice of the category. If they sound the same, the personality has not been defined.

03. Structure

How the brand architecture supports the business model. How different audiences are addressed without losing coherence. How the brand scales without losing what made it worth building in the first place.

This is the layer most often skipped in early-stage companies — and the one that becomes the most expensive to fix later. When a brand grows without architectural clarity, it creates inconsistencies that feel small individually but compound into a perception problem over time.

"When a brand grows without architectural clarity, the inconsistencies feel small individually — and compound into a perception problem over time."

One of the most misused elements in brand strategy is the list of brand values. In most cases, they are aspirational words chosen to sound good — Innovation, Excellence, Integrity — that end up on a slide no one ever opens again.

The way I structure cultural pillars is different. Each one is defined with its own rationale, a specific reason why this value matters for this brand in this market moment. And each one functions as a recurring verification criterion for future decisions: does this action align with who we said we are?

In practice, this means the cultural pillars show up in hiring decisions, in product communication, in the choice of partnerships, and in how the brand responds when something goes wrong. If a value is not being used as a filter in real decisions, it is not a value. It is decoration.

"If a value is not being used as a filter in real decisions, it is not a value. It is decoration."

A common mistake in brand strategy is starting the tone of voice definition with adjectives: "we are direct, warm, and approachable." Those adjectives mean nothing without the principles behind them, and they mean even less without examples of what they look like in practice versus what they do not look like.

The way I structure tone of voice always includes three elements:

The principle. A clear statement of how the brand communicates and why.

The contrast. What the brand sounds like versus what it deliberately avoids sounding like.

The real example. A before-and-after using a real scenario from the brand's world — a product error message, an onboarding screen, a social post, a sales email.

The real example is what makes the difference. Any team can write "be direct without being cold." But seeing the contrast between "We are working to resolve the technical issue" and "We know this is disrupting your day. We are already on it and will notify you as soon as it is resolved" — that is what makes the principle usable.

When a company grows beyond a single product, the question of brand architecture becomes urgent. How do the different parts of the business relate to each other? Do they share a name? Do they compete for attention? Does the parent brand strengthen the sub-brands, or dilute them?

These are business questions with brand consequences — and they cannot be answered without understanding the business model, the target audiences, and the long-term growth direction of the organization.

In projects involving multiple brands or products within the same group, I map the architecture explicitly: which entities are under the parent brand, which operate independently, and which are treated as partners rather than subsidiaries. That last distinction — partner versus subsidiary — is often the one that changes the most about how a brand presents itself to the market.

"The distinction between 'partner brand' and 'sub-brand' changes everything about how a company presents itself — and how the market reads it."

One of the frameworks I use most consistently is a positioning funnel mapped across time — not a funnel of conversion, but a funnel of brand evolution. It shows where the brand stands today, what the next milestone of perception looks like, and what the long-term position is that all current decisions are building toward.

This matters because brand positioning is not a state. It is a trajectory. The decisions made in year one should be coherent with the position the brand intends to occupy in year five — even if the year-one execution looks very different from the year-five version.

In practice, this means I never define a positioning for a brand without asking: what does this positioning make possible in three years that would be impossible without it? If the answer is not clear, the positioning is not doing its job.

"Positioning is not a state. It is a trajectory. Every decision in year one should be coherent with the position the brand intends to occupy in year five."

At the end of every project, I ask one question: can the founding team use this as a filter tomorrow, without me in the room?

If the answer is yes, the strategy worked. If the answer is no, I produced a good document — which is not the same thing.

A strategy that works is one where the positioning is specific enough to exclude some opportunities and prioritize others. Where the personality is concrete enough to guide a copywriter who never attended the immersion sessions. Where the architecture is clear enough that a new product can be placed within the system without a three-hour meeting to decide where it fits.

That is the standard I hold every brand strategy to. Not the quality of the document. The quality of the decisions it enables after it is delivered.