"Brand" Is Doing Too Much Work

An argument for why brand strategy keeps getting mistaken for design, marketing and creative direction, and why that confusion costs businesses more than they realise.

The word "brand" gets asked to cover too much ground. Logo. Tone of voice. Culture. Reputation. Campaign plan. The founder's mood on a Tuesday. When one word is stretched that much, everyone who touches any part of it gets to call their bit "brand strategy," while probably doing something else entirely.

A designer crafts a new logo and calls it brand strategy. A marketing team writes a campaign calendar and calls it brand strategy. An agency pitches a rebrand off the back of a moodboard and calls the moodboard "strategic." Most of this isn't dishonest. A logo can be strategic. A campaign can express a positioning brilliantly. The problem is the label, not the work. Calling design "strategy" lets the actual question go unanswered: what is this business for, and why should anyone prefer it over alternatives?

A business that doesn't answer the real question ends up outsourcing its whole identity to whoever pitched the nicest deck, spends a substantial sum on a new look and then can't work out why they're not now, bathing in cash. Everyone involved loved the rebrand, but the sales didn't grow with the same enthusiasm.

Part of the reason this happens is that there's no single credible authority most business owners can point to and say "that's what brand strategy means, full stop." Design schools teach design. Marketing courses teach marketing. Brand strategy sits in the gap between them, closer to business strategy than either, and it rarely gets taught as its own discipline. So the word drifts to whoever's in the room with the most confidence and the greatest bravery about what to call it in their invoice.

We've set out the plain definitions separately: what brand strategy actually is, where it sits in a business and when you need it, on a companion reference page. This piece is the fuller argument, the examples of brand strategy working and failing, the pitfalls and what the agencies who do this for the world's biggest brands can teach us about keeping strategy and creative direction properly separate.

Examples of brand strategy working

The businesses most often cited as brand strategy successes tend to share one thing. The strategic decision came first, and the design or marketing that followed was simply the clearest possible expression of it, not a substitute for it.

IKEA built "a better everyday life for the many people" into an operating principle, not a tagline. Flat-pack construction, warehouse retail, self-assembly and low pricing all flow from that one sentence, a business model built to serve a strategic position, not a design choice.

Patagonia committed, structurally, to "we're in business to save our home planet," to the point of becoming a legal benefit corporation and actively encouraging customers to buy less. That's a strategic position expensive enough to be credible, which is exactly why it worked commercially rather than despite commercial logic.

Dove's repositioning from functional moisturiser to "real beauty" didn't change the product. It changed what the brand was allowed to say and show, built on a sharp insight about how the category made women feel. The strategy came first; the (now famous) advertising was simply the most visible proof of it.

Procter & Gamble run close to eighty brands that deliberately compete against each other in the same category, Tide against Ariel, because the strategic decision was made at portfolio level: maximise shelf share across a category rather than protect a single master brand. Amazon, by contrast, stretched one master brand across wildly different categories, cloud computing, video, groceries, voice assistants, because its strategic bet was that trust in the Amazon name would transfer. Both are coherent brand strategies. They're opposite architectures, chosen deliberately for different reasons.

Tropicana is the useful cautionary tale. In 2009 the packaging was redesigned to look cleaner and more contemporary. Sales fell around 20% within two months and the original packaging came back almost as fast. Nothing about the underlying brand strategy changed, the product, the positioning, the audience were all identical, but a visual decision was made as if it were a strategic one, and the market punished the gap between the two.

That last example is the clearest illustration of the whole argument. Strategy and design are not interchangeable, and treating a design decision as though it settles a strategic question is exactly how expensive mistakes get made.

Brand strategy versus creative direction

This is where most of the confusion is, and we'll get into it in depth, because the two disciplines do different jobs.

Brand strategy answers why and where: why should this business matter to this audience, and where should it be positioned relative to its competitors. It's built on research, business context and, sometimes, hard commercial trade-offs. Its output is usually a position, a set of principles and a case for why that position will hold up over the long term.

Creative direction answers how and what: how should that position look, sound and feel, and what specific work, a campaign, an identity system, a piece of packaging, brings it to life for a particular audience at a particular moment. It's built on craft, taste and cultural fluency, and its output is the work itself.

The confusion happens in a very common way. Creative output is the part everyone can see and the part that often costs the most to produce, so it's easy to mistake visibility and cost for strategic weight. A rebrand with a striking new identity feels strategic because it's dramatic and expensive. But dramatic and expensive isn't the same as considered, and a business can absolutely commission brilliant creative direction built on a positioning nobody properly worked out. It usually looks fantastic, right up until the market notices there's nothing underneath it holding the story together.

You can have creative direction without brand strategy. Plenty of agencies sell exactly that, well, as a rebrand. You cannot have brand strategy without eventually needing creative direction to express it. The two need each other, in that order, and the businesses that end up spending big for disappointing commercial results are almost always the ones that do this the other way around.

What the leading brand strategy agencies say about their own work

If the distinction between brand strategy and creative execution held up anywhere, it should be at the agencies trusted with the world's biggest brands. It largely does.

Siegel+Gale built its entire reputation on one strategic thesis, that simplicity is a competitive advantage. Its "Simple is Smart" positioning and annual World's Simplest Brands study aren't design outputs, they're strategic research used to make the case that clarity drives brand value, revenue and loyalty before a single visual decision gets made. Clients including American Express, Samsung and Citi have been through that process. The design work that follows is disciplined precisely because the strategic thesis constrains it.

Edenspiekermann is one of the more useful examples in this whole argument, because it lists Brand Strategy and Brand Design as two separate, named services rather than folding one into the other. Its manifesto is nice and blunt about where the authority sits. "We work for your customers. We may have to take their side at times" is a strategic, outside-in commitment that exists before any identity work starts. Its own service page is titled, tellingly, "Great logo. Who cares?", a fairly direct dig at exactly the confusion this piece is arguing against, that a beautiful mark, on its own, isn't a strategy.

Interbrand effectively invented brand valuation in the 1980s to prove that brands function as financial assets, not just marketing collateral. That's still the core of its pitch. Brand strategy sits at the level of the balance sheet, investor confidence and talent decisions, not the level of campaign execution. It positions itself as advising organisations on "brand economics" before visual design ever enters the conversation.

Wolff Olins frames its strategy work explicitly as answering "why" and "what makes you special," treating visual identity, logo, colour, typography, motion, as a distinct, later stage it calls the "sensory expression" of a position that's already been decided. Its own language for the combination, "maths and magic," is a fairly precise description of the relationship. The maths (strategy, positioning, research) has to lead before the magic (creative execution) means anything.

Landor has spent decades on brand strategy for globally recognised names, FedEx among the most cited, where the strategic decision (a distinct, ownable, internationally pronounceable identity built for an expanding logistics business) mattered considerably more than the now-famous hidden arrow in the logo. The arrow gets the attention. The strategic brief that made the whole system necessary is the actual reason it worked.

Five very different agencies, five different house styles with the same underlying structure in each case. A named, resourced strategic phase has to conclude before creative direction is allowed to start in every one of them. None of them treat the two as one discipline. That consistency, across firms that compete with each other for the same major clients, is about as strong a piece of evidence as this argument is going to get.

The point of all this

None of this is a case against design, creative direction or marketing. It's a case for an order of play. Get the strategic question answered honestly first, and the design work that follows has something worth saying. Get it backwards, and even brilliant creative work has nothing behind it.

Brand strategy is a business decision, not a design output. The businesses that treat it that way are the ones whose creative work earns its cost, because there was something worth saying before anyone opened a moodboard.

For the plain definitions in short form, plus a full FAQ, see the companion reference page: Brand Strategy.