You’re starting or scaling a business and, with a million and one things on your to-do list, you’re struggling to sift the buzzwords from the buzz-worths. And “strategy” seems to be everyone’s favourite buzzword these days. But what does it mean in relation to branding?

In short, a brand strategy is incredibly helpful and, for many businesses, crucial, because:

• Your brand is more than just a logo; it’s the perception that your customers have of your business. It’s how they feel about your products, services, and even your company culture.

• A brand strategy is the map that connects your branding and your business goals.

• A successful brand strategy will help you stand out from the crowd, connect you to your customers, and help achieve your business goals.

Alright, now let’s break it down.

What is a brand?

Before we can get into brand strategy, we need to understand what a brand actually is. “You mean it’s not the logo I typed out in Word, screen-shotted and slapped onto my website?”, I hear you ask. Well. There’s just a tad more to it.

We use branding to differentiate our product, service or organisation from others with a similar or substitutable offering.

A brand is best summarised as a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or an organisation (the Marty Neumeier definition). That person could be a customer, someone who’s deciding whether they want to be a customer, or just an observer. Importantly, that person is not you as the brand owner.

When we are branding a product, service or organisation, we are coming up with the outward expression of that brand. This consists of the elements that you are familiar with, such as a name, logo and colour palette, but also encompasses parts of the brand that are less tangible, such as its values, purpose, personality and tone of voice.

Together, these make up what you are saying about the offering, but in the end a brand is what the public is left feeling about it.

Because the essence of our brand is determined by the experience of third parties, it is something we can only steer through branding. And steering is best done with a map, not blind.

Where does strategy come into this?

We now understand what a brand is. So what is strategy? According to the Oxford Language Dictionary, strategy is “a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.”

Brand strategy is the map that helps us steer our brand in the direction of its goals.

It is the process by which we make our branding align with our target customer and our business goals.

In brief, the main pins on the brand strategy map are:

• Research: we have to understand our market, customers and competitors in order to make effective decisions about our brand.

• Definition: developing the brand’s values, purpose, personality and visual identity, all of which is informed by our findings from the research stage.

• Implementation: an action plan for putting in place our branding across effectively and across all touch points of our business. This is arguably the most important step within brand strategy, because a brand is only as strong as its implementation.

• Maintenance: a brand is a living thing - it isn’t done when the designing is done. It needs to be reviewed periodically and managed continuously. The deeper the implementation of the brand within the business, the easier this is to do.

Whilst you can never have complete control over your brand (I’m sure Microsoft would have loved to be the “cool” guy before it was perceived as decidedly not that thanks in part to some clever moves by Apple), brands that have a strategy are much more likely to be able to make their customers feel the way they want them to feel about their brand.

Brand strategy plots your branding and visuals against your business goals. This should make its success measurable, just as much as your goals are.

A successful brand strategy:

• connects your brand with your audience, making your existing customers happy and attracting more of your ideal customers, and

• therefore drives business growth and helps your business achieve its business goals.

If you’re looking to build a successful business, brand strategy is extremely useful. And if you want to build a strong, recognisable brand, a strategy is essential.

This article is a brief overview of brand strategy, and the first article in Light Sauce Studio’s series Brand Saucery, a guide to brand and visual strategy for start-ups and scaleups looking to connect with their audience smash their business goals. Subscribe to our newsletter to get notified of new drops of the secret sauce.

Written by Eliska Collier, founder and creative director of Light Sauce Studio.