20 Brand Strategy Tips from 20 Years of Brand Strategy

Lessons from the pursuit of creating something out of nothing.

Image via Unsplash

I’ve been lucky to have worked with some of the most creative minds in the brand building business. Advising remarkable businesses like Google, Lyft, Mozilla, Microsoft, HSBC, Adidas to name drop a few. Here are twenty tips from that journey. I wanted to share more, but you know 20 years and 20 tips just felt right. Let me know your favourite.

1. You can’t fake it. You need to find a truth within your business and make it matter.
2. Your strategy will either be based on a product, audience, category or cultural truth. If you can align all four, magic will happen.
3. The way you communicate your strategy is sometimes more important than the strategy itself. It needs to travel way beyond any boardroom and captivate people.
4. Segmentation done well will unlock enormous value. Done poorly it will confuse and mislead.
5. One enduring brand idea will beat many little ideas.
6. A tagline will help organise your thinking and decision making, even if you don’t use it as a tagline.
7. You can’t develop a great strategy through the lens of envy. Know what your competitors are doing but never mirror them.
8. The promised land is to create a category of one position. You might not be able to create a physical monopoly, but you can create a monopoly of the mind.
9. Avoid all staged research methodologies. Talk to real people, in real settings, about everyday life.
10. Brand can be bigger than the business. And it’s certainly bigger than advertising.
11. Once you’ve discovered your central brand idea, revisit your entire business and look at it through the lens of the idea. Reinvent and reconfigure accordingly.
12. Don’t become addicted to performance marketing or you will never reap the rewards of accumulating brand value.
13. How your brand says something is equal to what it says.
14. Underpromise, overdeliver.
15. Find a brilliant designer to be the steward of how the brand shows up, give them freedom to create.
16. Give people a vision to grow into. Personal happiness comes from growth.
17. If your brand makes a mistake, own up without hesitation.
18. Trying to get everybody to like you will result in nobody loving you.
19. Use data to inform your decisions but don’t let it silence your gut. Your gut will unlock the remarkable things that are borderline crazy.
20. Trends come and go. Icons live forever. Be an icon, not a fad.

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