You Bought “Brand Strategy” and Got a Junk Logo
Every kitchen has the drawer with the tape and the spare keys and the batteries that may or may not be dead. Nothing in it is actually junk, but the drawer is called the junk drawer, so that is what everything inside it turns into, including the warranty you go looking for two years later and never find.
The phrase “brand strategy” does that to a company. It files the work under the decorative half of the business, so the decorative half is the only part that ever gets bought, and the rest of what was supposed to be in there quietly becomes junk.
Gallup asked employees whether they know what their company stands for and what makes its brands different from the competition. Only 41% strongly agreed. Split by level, 60% of executives said yes and 37% of everyone below a manager did, which means the further you get from the people who paid for the strategy, the less of it exists. The people at the bottom of that gap are the ones your customer actually talks to.
If you have bought branding before, you probably think you already know what this work is, because you paid for it and it arrived as a logo, a typeface, and a deck with the word “positioning” on slide four. That belief is reasonable. It is what was sold to you, by people who sincerely believed they were selling it, and it is what the entire category advertises. Until a few years ago I would have described the job the same way, and I was wrong about it in a way that took me an embarrassingly long time to see.
Brand Strategy vs Brand Identity Is the Wrong Question
Every agency site on the internet has a page explaining the difference. Strategy is the thinking, identity is the look. One answers why and for whom, the other answers how it comes out. All of it is true and none of it helps, because both halves live inside the same word, and the word is what is broken.
Watch what happens when the two get sold. Identity is easy to sell because you can see it on a screen. Strategy is thinking, and the deliverable is a document that photographs badly. So the brief arrives asking for a logo and a website while describing a problem that is entirely about who the company is for and what it is allowed to charge. The agency builds the thing that was asked for, because that is the thing that was asked for. Later the founder works out that what they bought was a look instead of a plan.
That is not a scam. It is a filing error, and the drawer is named wrong.
Ask Three People What You Stand For
Here is a test that takes an afternoon. Ask three people who work for you what the company stands for and what makes it different from the other options. Do it separately, write down what they say, and do not help them. If you get three different answers, you do not have a brand strategy. You have a logo and a set of opinions.
That test works because a brand is not a thing the company owns. It is the sum of what everyone who touches it does when nobody is watching. The person answering your phone is executing brand strategy whether or not anyone ever told them so. So is the person writing the shipping email, and the one deciding whether to refund the customer who is obviously lying.
This is where the name does its real damage. Filed under decoration, none of that is in scope. Nobody briefs the warehouse on positioning. The refund rule does not get rewritten because the strategy says you are the company that does not argue with people. That deck goes in the shared drive, the business keeps running on whatever it was running on before, and everyone agrees the new look is great.
The Name Decides Who Owns It
Names decide budgets, and budgets decide how long something lives. Call it brand and it belongs to marketing, so it gets a marketing budget, a marketing owner, and a marketing lifespan.
That lifespan is short. Spencer Stuart put the average tenure of a big-company marketing chief at 4.1 years, against 5 for the C-suite as a whole. At consumer companies it falls to 3.5. The job that supposedly governs what an entire company means gets handed to the executive most likely to be gone before it pays off.
It is also getting harder to pay for. Gartner surveyed 426 senior marketing leaders last autumn and found 84% of them inside what it calls a “brand doom loop”: brand goes unmeasured, so nobody trusts the numbers, so it gets less money, so it gets measured even less. Julie Reeves, the Gartner analyst who presented it, put the whole thing in one sentence: “This creates a cycle where brand is undermeasured, underfunded and undervalued.”
“This creates a cycle where brand is undermeasured, underfunded and undervalued.”
Julie Reeves, VP Analyst, Gartner
The people signing the checks have noticed. Boathouse put the question to 150 chief executives in January. The share of them who call marketing a profit center rather than a cost dropped from 65% to 40% in a single year. That is not a department getting a bad review, that is a department getting reclassified.
The same study asked who actually runs strategy. 8% of those chief executives said their marketing chief leads it. So the work that is supposed to decide what a company means belongs to a department almost no boss considers strategic.
It gets stranger. WARC’s Multiplier Playbook put the question to senior marketers, and 67% said their chief executive believes brand is important, while 19% said leadership routinely connects brand equity to a measurable business result. Both of those are true at the same time, which is the problem. Everyone agrees it matters and almost nobody can show where it lands.
What Would Have to Be In It
This is the paragraph where a branding blog tells you a brand is “more than a logo.” It is. That sentence has been on agency websites for twenty years and has never once changed what anybody bought, because it describes what the work is not and never says what it covers.
So here is the scope. Strip the word out and it is a plan for how a business behaves toward the people it depends on, and there are three of them: the customers, the people who work there, and the people deciding where the money goes. All three have to be told the same story, and they hear it from different things. The customer hears it from the packaging and the price. Your staff hear it from whatever gets praised in a meeting. Whoever holds the budget hears it from a number you can actually show them, which is the one almost nobody prepares.
Almost nothing in a standard branding engagement touches more than the first of those. That is not because strategists are lazy. The word set the boundary before the first meeting, and everyone in the room accepted it, including the one being paid. So you get a third of a strategy sold at the price of a whole one, which is a fucking great business model right up until the client works out what happened.
I think the naming problem is real and I also think renaming it fixes nothing, which is an annoying position to hold. People in this field have argued about the term for years and the work kept getting bought the same way, because you can rename the drawer this afternoon and nothing inside it moves.
What moves is the scope you buy next time. So the next time someone tries to sell you on the importance of brand strategy, sit back, cross your arms, and ask them what brand strategy actually is and why you should give a shit.
If they start sweating bullets and talking about “feeling” and “vibe,” you now know what a red flag looks like, waved by a Snickers salesman. And if they start talking about real practical use cases that change what people actually do, what it means for who you hire next and what your refund rule says, and how that hits the bottom line either directly or indirectly, then you have got someone who knows the real definition of brand strategy. Hire that one.
Decoration is a real thing worth real money too, right up until you need it to do a job it was never scoped to do. If you cannot tell which of the two you are short of, that is what the audit is for, and the work on the other side of it is over at the case studies.
Three people, three answers, one afternoon. Go find out what is in your drawer.
TL;DR
The word “brand” files the work under decoration, so decoration is what gets bought and everything else in the scope quietly becomes junk.
Gallup found only 41% of employees strongly agree they know what their company stands for, and 37% below manager level. The ones furthest from the strategy face your customers.
Called brand, it belongs to marketing: a 3.5-year owner at consumer companies, and a budget that costs you standing to ask for.
Gartner puts 84% of companies in a brand doom loop: unmeasured, so distrusted, so unfunded, so measured even less.
Ask three employees what you stand for. Three different answers means you bought a logo and a set of opinions.
Common Questions
What is the actual difference between brand strategy and brand identity?
Identity is what the company looks and sounds like. Strategy is supposed to be the decisions underneath it, including ones that have nothing to do with how anything looks. The reason the distinction never sticks is that both are filed under the same word, so buyers reasonably assume both are about appearance.
How do I tell whether I bought a strategy or a look?
Read what you were given and count the sentences that would change something outside of marketing. A plan that changes nothing about hiring, service, or what you charge is an identity system with a longer document attached.
Is a brand strategy worth it for a smaller company?
The scope matters more than the size. At a big company this work belongs to whoever runs marketing. With twelve people it belongs to nobody at all, which is why the answers to that three-person test tend to be so far apart.
Does renaming the discipline actually fix anything?
No, and that is worth saying plainly. The name explains how the boundary got drawn. Changing what you ask for in the next engagement is the part that moves anything.
