What a brand strategy consultancy delivers

A brand strategy consultancy should hand you four things at the end: a position someone could disagree with, the evidence behind it, a way of making decisions with it, and a shelf life longer than your next campaign. If a proposal cannot tell you which of those you are buying, it is selling something else.

Plenty of businesses already own a strategy. It lives in a deck from a previous agency, beautifully laid out and opened twice. Meanwhile the decisions it was meant to settle get made by whoever argues longest in the room: which event to sponsor, which product to drop, what to call the new range. Each one pulls the brand a little further from the last. A few years on, nobody can say in a sentence what it stands for, and every campaign has to explain the company from scratch.

Brand strategy is sold as anything from a half-day workshop to a six-month engagement, and what arrives at the end varies just as much. Before you commission one, know what it should leave in your hands.

Strategy and the logo

A visual identity expresses a strategic decision. It is not the decision. If an agency opens with mood boards before it has settled who you are for and why they should care, you are paying a strategy invoice for design work. The strategy comes first, and it writes the design brief.

Four words people mix up

The terms are used loosely, and a proposal that blurs them is hard to compare with one that does not.

Term	What it is	What you hold at the end
Brand strategy	The decisions about who you are for, what you offer them and why you, in a form you can act on	A short document and the evidence behind it
Positioning	The single place in the customer's mind you want to own, set against the alternatives	One sentence, tested against competitors
Brand identity	How the brand looks and sounds: logo, colour, type, voice	A visual and verbal system
Brand guidelines	The rules for using that identity consistently	A reference others can follow without asking you

Positioning sits inside strategy, identity expresses it, and guidelines keep it consistent. If a quote lists only the last two, it is not strategy work.

Four things the engagement should hand you

1. A position someone could disagree with. "We are for X, not for Y, because Z" is a position. "We care about quality and doing things properly" is not: any competitor could put it on their own site unchanged, and that is the test of whether a positioning statement means anything.

2. The evidence behind it. A position should rest on something from outside your own building: customer conversations, research into the category, a gap in how competitors describe themselves. The final document need not show all its working. You should still be able to ask where each conclusion came from and get an answer.

3. A way of making decisions. Hold it against a real choice, whether to sponsor an event, launch a product line or say yes to a partnership, and it should give you an answer. A strategy that cannot help you say no to anything is too vague to help you say yes.

4. A shelf life. A good position still makes sense after your next three campaigns have come and gone. If the document reads like this quarter's campaign brief with a longer title, the engagement was scoped too small.

How the work usually runs

Engagements differ in length, but the order is remarkably consistent.

Discovery. Interviews with the people who run the business, and a read of what already exists: past decks, websites, sales material and the way customers describe you in their own words.
Research. Conversations with customers and people who chose someone else, and a look at how competitors describe themselves. This is where the insight comes from.
Synthesis. The patterns across everything gathered, reduced to a small number of real options for who you could be.
Decision. A working session with the people who can say yes. One option is chosen, and the others are put aside deliberately.
Articulation. The chosen position written down plainly, with the evidence, the decision rules and the things the brand will not do.
Handover. Briefing the people who will use it: marketing, sales, whoever commissions design and writes copy. A strategy nobody has been briefed on does not exist yet.

If a proposal skips research or handover, ask what takes their place.

Who needs to be in the room

Strategy gets stuck when the person who can approve it is not present at the decision stage. Include the head of the business, whoever owns sales and whoever owns marketing. Add one person from the front line, who talks to customers every week and will say when a line does not ring true. Anyone you leave out will reopen the decision afterwards, and that costs more than the extra hour.

What changes the size of the job

Quotes for brand strategy vary widely because the scope varies widely. These are the things that move it:

The number of distinct audiences, and whether you need a position for each or one for all of them.
How many markets or product lines the brand has to cover.
How many customer and stakeholder conversations the research includes.
The number of working sessions with your team, and who attends.
Whether naming, identity or guidelines are inside the engagement or priced as the next job.
How much of the rollout the consultancy supports once the document exists.

Ask for these to be written beside the quote, so you can compare two proposals on the same footing.

Before you commission one

Ask how much of the work involves talking to your customers and how much is workshops with your own team. Both help. A strategy built only from the inside misses the outside view, which is usually where the insight is.
Ask what you will hold at the end, and how it gets used the week after it is delivered. A strategy that lives only in a presentation stops working the day the presentation ends.
If the engagement includes a name, check the shortlist before anyone falls for one. Stillroom's free Name Bench shows who already has a name as a domain, a social handle, a company or a trade mark.

Red flags in a proposal

It opens with the deliverables you will see (logo, colours) and never mentions the decision the work should settle.
The method is a framework with a catchy name, and the proposal cannot say what each step produces.
There are no customer conversations, only workshops with your own team.
The result is described as inspiring, powerful or transformative, and never as something you could test against a real decision.
Nobody can say who will do the thinking after the pitch.

How you will know it worked

Do not wait for sales figures. They move for too many reasons. Look for earlier signs that the strategy is doing its job:

Decisions that used to take a meeting now take a conversation, because there is something to hold them against.
The people who write your copy, build your pages and brief your designers describe the brand in the same way without being prompted.
When a customer repeats back what you do, it sounds like your position.
You have said no to something because it did not fit, and nobody argued.

Where to start

Stillroom's strategy work starts from the decision you are trying to make. Tell us what that decision is at info@stillroomcreative.com, and we will tell you where to begin.

A year on, you should be able to settle a hard decision by reading one sentence out loud.

FAQ

How long should a brand strategy engagement take?

It depends on the size of the business and how much original research is involved. Ask how many customer conversations the timeline includes; a plan with none in it is a workshop, which is worth buying when it is called a workshop.

Do I need strategy work before every rebrand?

No. Sometimes a design is simply dated and needs updating with no change in what the business stands for. Strategy matters most when the business itself has changed, through a new market, a new audience, a merger or a pivot, and the old position no longer fits.

Can strategy work be done in-house?

Yes, if someone inside has the skill and the distance to say where the current positioning is weak. The hard part of internal strategy is rarely the analysis. It is being willing to say what the team does not want to hear.

What's the difference between brand strategy and marketing strategy?

Brand strategy settles who you are and why it matters; marketing strategy settles how you reach people and what you say to them once that is decided. Marketing built without a brand strategy underneath it tends to produce campaigns that never add up to anything.

What is brand positioning?

It is the one place you want to hold in your customer's mind, set against the alternatives they have. A good one fits in a sentence, says who you are for and why you, and can be checked by asking customers and by comparing it with how competitors describe themselves.

What is the difference between brand strategy and brand identity?

Strategy is the decision about who you are for and what you stand for. Identity is how that decision looks and sounds: the logo, colours, typography and voice. Identity without strategy tends to be decoration, and it is the first thing to be redone when the business changes direction.

What should I prepare before the first meeting with a consultancy?

The decision or problem that prompted the work, anything written about your customers, past strategy documents and the names of two or three people who buy from you and would take a call. A short list of competitors you admire, and ones you do not, also helps.

How do I know if my brand needs strategy work?

Signs include different people describing the business in different ways, campaigns that need long explanations, decisions settled by whoever argues longest, or a recent change in your market or customers that your current position does not reflect.

Who should be involved on my side?

Whoever can approve the outcome, plus the people who will use it: sales and marketing, and one person who speaks to customers every week. Leaving out the approver is the most common reason strategy work stalls at the end.

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