Brand strategy is a vital phase in any branding project. But while many think strategy is all about crunching numbers, it’s actually a creative act, too.

This is the second article in a series describing Sublimio’s approach to branding projects. In case you haven’t read the previous one about the listening phase, you can find it here.

‎When a company is starting off a branding project, it’s normal to be impatient and want to see a logo straight away.

That’s not how we usually work at Sublimio, though. As many of our clients know, we strongly suggest going through brand strategy first.

This first phase of the work not only lays the groundwork for everything that follows: it creates a mutual understanding between all the parts, that makes it easier to move forward.

Understanding the Context

In order to get started with our brand strategy work, a good deal of research is in order. We need to understand the wider context that surrounds the brand. To do so, we have a few fields we need to explore.

‎The first – and most unsurprising one – is the field of competitor brands. Unsurprising, yes, but not entirely banal. The idea of who your competitors are is not so straightforward.

Is it just your category? And if so, what sizes and types of brands really matter in terms of competition? Or should you be looking at another category that is not direct competition but relates more to how your business operates?

‎While selecting the competitors can be hard enough, analyzing them also demands some choices on our side.

What are we comparing, really? Yes, you can position them on the canonical two-axis graph, but is that enough? Sometimes, what you need is a business perspective, other times it is a narrative one.

Then, of course, we widen our gaze to look at society and culture. After all, our audience lives in the world, not just in the market. What is going on with them? What are their preoccupations, their new fixations, how is the perception of the category shifting?

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Hard Data and Weak Signals

Brand strategy is not an exact science: the analytical phase of the work is not just about crunching numbers and spitting out the correct answer. One could say that brand strategy is a “non deterministic” process, where inputs can vary and there could be many different right answers.
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This has an impact on how we gather information. Hard data is always good: reports, charts, tables can give a stronger confidence both to us and the client. And yet, for the exact same reason, hard data can be deceiving.

What is missing, of course, is nuances. Hard data oversimplifies and sometimes presents a partial picture as absolute truth.

‎This is the reason why brand strategy needs to pick up weak signals, too. These clues belong to the world of qualitative analysis: editorial articles, lyrics of popular songs, e-commerce reviews. None of this would stand the test of statistical relevance, of course. Who cares what a song says after all?

‎If you were a reader of Sherlock Holmes, though, you would know how weak signals can lead to the solution. A brand strategist, just like a detective, is supposed to have a good sensitivity and pick them up quickly.

What is even more important is that many of these signals we pick up in our daily lives, even before a branding project has started. Constantly being open to contamination is key to being ready when the brief lands.

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Connecting the Dots

Since we started on the detective metaphor, let’s keep going. In brand strategy, gathering data is never enough, as data contains no answer: after the first phase, all we are looking at is a big bunch of stuff that means nothing.

This is where we start doing the connecting work. Connections are neither obvious nor necessary. We make them and we might be wrong – yes, brand strategy is scary – but they are vital.

What links a new trend in video-making to the rise of a competitor? How is an economic downturn linked to new preferences in beverages?

Insights for brand strategy differ from those regarding an advertising campaign (unless it’s a long-running one). When thinking brand strategy, we should identify broader movements both in the market and in culture, that will support the brand positioning in the long term.

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Cutting Through and Taking Sides

Defining the proper brand strategy is a matter of sacrifice. What do you do and – most importantly – what don’t you do?

‎As good as our insights are, they still don’t tell us how to behave or where to position the brand. Hard choices are needed once again. We try to dive head-first into controversy, taking a precise stance and defining a positioning that won’t feel like a lukewarm mash of random things.

‎Brand strategy is not just a few tidy pages of brand bureaucracy (mission, vision, brand statement), but a chart for future action. We believe strong brands are only built on clear brand strategies.

For example, a jewelry brand that ditches the standard luxury language and creates a punk rock positioning to stand out, or a sake brand that aims to make people understand how sake is a convivial drink.

‎This is why our brand strategy documents tend to be free–form rather than follow rigid templates. Brand strategy is in itself a creative act based on lucid understanding.

Each brand needs not just a different strategy but a tailored approach. For some, it’s about how to present the product. For others, it’s about how to tap into cultural change.

‎A brand strategy document should aim for surprise, even shock. Not for reassurance. At least, that’s how we do it.