You’re not a brand strategist, but a well-informed designer. (And that’s okay).
How most brand strategy courses mislead their students.
Discovering brand strategy, the gold mine of designers.
I remember when I discovered the term brand strategy.
“Whoa,” I thought to myself. “That is it. It’s not the design that makes brands extraordinary. It’s the strategy supporting the brand and consequently, the design!” It sounds like a fairytale when you first hear it.
Of course it does, you want to stand out from the market. Of course, you want to offer something far more valuable than design and charge extra for it. You sniff around and learn that this extra actually means another zero or two. Before you know it, you are set to become a brand strategist.
I know this because I’ve been there. The thought of my new career consumed me. I spent day and night researching the term, binge-watching every possible video on brand strategy, then gathered all the spendings I had and invested in a few brand strategy courses.
They were AMAZING. I was balling when I scrolled through the curriculum, and by the time I entered the seamless world of LMS, I was won over. Completely.
The thing is I have always been fascinated by research, analysis, and planning. I’ve always known that the pre-design part of the process was what made my work as a designer so strong. Later on, I worked in marketing and user experience design, so that love and passion for data-driven design decisions grew even more substantial.
The notion of brand strategy drugged me. And before you knew it, I successfully pitched a brand strategy to a client. I walked into a “brand strategy” workshop super confident yet scared because that wouldn’t be my first time facilitating a workshop. It went well. Oh boy, it went well.
One month later, I had my own “brand strategy framework” designed, and I was booking my first clients to test it. They were happy, too. But that’s when I started to see that something wasn’t cutting it. What I was doing didn’t feel like strategy.
That’s because it wasn’t.
Brand Discovery Versus Brand Strategy
According to the 12th edition of the book called Exploring Strategy —
Strategy is a long-term direction of an organization, formed by choices and actions about its resources and scope. — Exploring Strategy, 12th edition
What I’d actually been doing with my clients back then was a so-called brand discovery. Not strategy.
To be fair, many of the courses that I’d purchased did throw the discovery word around quite a bit, but they always gave you a feeling that discovery equals strategy. Which is sadly not true.
A brand discovery workshop is a super useful method to learn more about the customer and be paid for it.
You learn about their vision, their why, draft brand attributes, craft personas together, discuss competitors, and set goals. It’s a fantastic way to learn about your client’s needs and expectations and the scope of work you can offer and pinpoint the challenges they might not (yet) be aware of. Maybe you do some customer journey mapping or value proposition mapping, and perhaps you craft a positioning statement — all precious stuff.
But once again, that is not strategy.
Brand discovery workshops are usually a way to craft an excellent creative brief for the client. Honestly, most clients aren’t very good with those, so having a proper brief is worth more than gold. A designer can develop a killer brand identity and amazing materials that will make everyone want to hire you with a brief like that.
You’re probably guessing what I am about to say at this point, right?
Once I realized that something was off, I decided to take a step back and do some research (oh, what an irony). That’s when I realized that there is a whole different world out there. The world that is entirely separated from the world of design.
I discovered the black hole of brand management, business development, and strategic planning.
When I studied Graphic and Interactive Communications, the world of marketing and communications never appealed to me. Learning that my peers studying media, communications, economy, and similar fields were probably far better off being brand strategists than I was, was eye-opening to me.
Design-led Versus Business-led BrandStrategy
Brand strategy is not doing Sinek’s Golden circle, making a few fictional personas, drawing up goals, and discussing competitors’ visuals and positioning.
The actual brand strategy is much, much more than that. It is not driven by the motivation to design something beautiful while at the same time fit the client’s needs (once you understand their market and ambition, that’s not so difficult).
You now understand that there are two brand strategy types floating around. The one that creatives usually come across is led by creativity and the motivation to upsell creative services. The other type revolves around business.
So what are the deliverables of both, and what does the design-led brand strategy lack? Let’s be the most optimistic we can be for both cases, shall we?
Design-led: mission statement, vision statement, the definition of values, UVP, brand attributes, brand archetype, approx. 3 personas, key messages, competitor analysis and positioning projections, goals, and scope of work that would make the client hit the goals (usually it’s the services that you can provide as a creative — visual identity, web development, photography, art direction, packaging, print, social media management, etc.)
A business-led strategy would be a bit different. Not just a neat brand book. It would start off with a brief, followed by a much more complex document covering everything listed above, but based on more information and better insight.
A business-led brand strategy takes business strategy and business models into account first.
It requires understanding the business as a whole (not just a department or two) since a considerable part of brand building is employer branding.
A brand strategy without brand culture is nothing, and you must start on the inside.
The internal branding is crafted with the help of data. Doing both primary (customer discovery interviews, focus groups, surveys …) and secondary research (reports, research, secondhand data …) is a must. A fictional persona doesn’t help your brand if it’s just a conclusion of a few stakeholders’ subjective opinions and perceptions. That is one of the main problems I have with design-led brand strategists: most of their strategy is based on assumptions.
But back to the topic — the business-led research will actually contain a thorough long-term plan about how a proposed branding approach will be applied across the whole company (or departments working with the brand), what each department has to do in order to make branding efforts efficient, how the actions will be measured, etc. Essentially, strategy doesn’t exist without establishing proper brand management. Pretty visuals, a mission statement on the website, and persona sheets are just a tiny portion of what a business-led brand strategy is.
Make no mistake. The design-led brand strategy is not wrong or bad.
Not at all. It’s great to see that more and more creatives make “brand strategy” their X factors. Why? Thus, their clients have way more chances to actually succeed with the outsourced creative services that those “strategists” upsell later on. Design without ANY research is a lottery. With a design-led brand strategy, at least you have a more in-depth understanding and the power to influence the end-product as a whole — not just on the outside, but on the inside, too.
The only issue here is that the term “brand strategy” is misleading in the case of a design-led brand strategy. What happens when the creatives purchase that kind of a course is that they genuinely believe that they are now brand strategists and can sell brand strategy. That may lead to mismanaged expectations (if the client expects business-led brand strategy, they are screwed) and an unclear distinction between the two in general. The two are of two completely different worlds, different value, cost, demand, scope, effort.
It MIGHT be the case that all the authors and educators out there explaining brand strategy actually do the business-led strategy, but that’s not what their students are learning. It’s a fact that it’s hard to get by a proper business-led brand strategy (discovery sessions a lot of times don’t even require NDAs), so those students have no idea about what a strategy looks like in terms of deliverables. I’ve talked to quite a few people who’ve experienced this. They all think that the discovery workshop is their main deliverable at the stage of “brand strategy,” followed by a summary with some extra copywriting.
The truth is — this would be only the beginning of a strategy. Yet, the designers jump straight to the execution of the “action plan,” which conveniently consists of more services they can provide.
Are you a creative professional just hearing about brand strategy for the first time?
By all means, start with what’s familiar. Start with other creatives-turned-strategists, learn about brand discovery processes, and gain some skill in that field. The conventional strategy is much more “blank” than the design-led type, so the transition will be more smooth that way (if you want to make the transition).
Suppose you are a creative professional already making brand discovery as a part of your service — good job!
I’d love to hear about your story and how you perceive brand strategy. Were you familiar with the distinction? Do you think you’d be able to ditch the hands-on creative work and become a data-led strategist that doesn’t spend most of the days working with software for creatives?
