The short version
- A brand strategy is a short set of decisions about who you serve, what you promise them, how you sound and how you look.
- For a small team, a brand strategy should fit on one page so that everyone can check a design or a sentence against it.
- The visual identity comes after the strategy, because colours and type are only right or wrong relative to what the brand is trying to say.
- A useful brand strategy names what the brand will not do, as well as what it will.
- Review the strategy every six months or after a big change in product or audience, not every time a competitor launches something.
On this page
A brand strategy is a short set of decisions that tells everyone on your team who you are for, what you promise them, why they should believe you, how you sound and how you look. For a startup or a small business it should fit on one page. If it is longer than that, nobody will open it when they are writing a post at five o'clock, and a strategy nobody opens is just a document.
The framework below takes a small team about half a day. Work through it in order, because each step narrows the next. The output is a single page you can pin, share and test real work against.
Brand strategy versus brand identity
People often start with the logo and the colours, then try to reverse engineer a reason for them. That is backwards. The strategy is the brief; the visual identity is one answer to it. Until you know what the brand is trying to say, there is no way to tell whether a colour is right.
Brand strategy
- Who the brand is for, and who it is not for
- The one promise it makes
- The proof that makes the promise believable
- Personality and voice in a few words
- What it will never do
Brand identity
- Name, logo and wordmark
- Colour palette and background look
- Typefaces and type rules
- Photo and illustration style
- Templates for the formats you post
A six step brand strategy framework
- 1
Name one audience
Describe the person you most want to serve in two sentences: what they are trying to do and what gets in their way. "Everyone who drinks coffee" is not an audience. "People working from home who want café coffee without the queue" is.
- 2
Write the promise
One sentence on what changes for that person because you exist. Keep it concrete enough that a competitor could not say it word for word.
- 3
List the proof
Three reasons the promise is true: something about the product, the people or the process. Proof is what stops a promise sounding like an advert.
- 4
Pick three personality words
Choose adjectives that pull against each other a little, such as warm, precise and unhurried. Brand personality has a method for choosing them.
- 5
Set the voice rules
Turn the personality into habits: sentence length, words you use, words you never use, how you handle a complaint.
- 6
Write the never list
Three to five things the brand will not do, even when it is tempting. This is the part that makes the other decisions real.
Step two is where most of the thinking happens. If you find it hard, write the positioning first: who it is for, what category you are in, and how you differ. Brand positioning walks through that sentence in detail.
A one page brand strategy example
Here is the whole framework filled in for a fictional coffee subscription called Fernway. Copy the layout and replace every cell with your own answers.
Fernway
Fernway
Fernway
Fernway
Fernway
Fernway
Fernway
Turning the strategy into a look
Once the words are settled, translate each one into something visible. "Unhurried" suggests generous margins and slow motion rather than flashing type. "Precise" suggests one typeface used with discipline. "Warm" points to a ground colour from the brown and cream end of the wheel rather than a cold blue. Brand voice and visuals shows how words and images reinforce each other.
The look is also where a small brand can win recognition fastest. A background people learn to spot in the feed does more work than a logo in the corner. Gradiently is built around exactly that: a Mark is a living background look with one owner at a time, crafted so no two look alike, and you can design with any unclaimed Mark for free before you claim one.
The promise, written as a headline. Short, concrete, in the brand voice.
The proof, turned into a useful post. Measurements, not adjectives, as the voice rules say.
Mistakes small teams make with brand strategy
- Copying a big brand's values. "Innovation, integrity, excellence" describes every company and therefore none.
- Serving everyone. A brand that speaks to everybody sounds like nobody in particular.
- Skipping the never list. Without it, every new idea gets a yes and the brand drifts.
- Changing the look every quarter. Recognition comes from repetition; brand consistency explains why boring repetition pays.
- Keeping the strategy in a slide deck. Put it where work is made, so it gets used.
Keeping the strategy alive
A strategy earns its keep when it travels into everyday tools. Put the voice and audience into whatever your team designs with. In Gradiently the brand kit holds your name, description, voice, audience and what the brand does alongside logos, colours and fonts, and the Designer writes in that voice when it drafts a post, so the strategy is applied rather than remembered.
Review the page every six months, or when your product or audience changes in a real way. Run a short brand audit at the same time to see where the work has drifted. Then carry on to the identity itself with how to create a brand identity.
Questions people ask
What is a brand strategy?
A brand strategy is a short set of decisions about who a brand serves, what it promises, why that promise is believable, and how the brand sounds and looks.
How long should a brand strategy be for a small business?
One page. Long enough to answer every design and copy question, short enough that people actually read it.
What comes first, brand strategy or logo?
Strategy. The logo, colours and type are only right or wrong relative to what the brand is trying to say.
What are the main parts of a brand strategy framework?
Audience, promise, proof, personality, voice rules, the visual direction and a list of things the brand will never do.
How often should a startup update its brand strategy?
Review it every six months or after a real change in product or audience. Small wording fixes are fine any time; the core should stay steady.
Written by Gradiently
The team behind Gradiently, a design tool built around Marks: living gradients that make everything you design look like yours.
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