Brand strategy consulting

Brand strategy consulting is the part of the work that happens before anything is designed. Most Studios does it as a scoped engagement with a written output: what you claim, who you claim it to, and why anyone should believe you.

The questions it answers

Who is the customer we actually want, as opposed to the one we currently get. What do they compare us against when we are not in the room. What can we say that a competitor could not say back. Where does the current story break, and for whom.

Most companies can answer two of those confidently. The engagement is usually about the other two, and about getting a leadership team that privately disagrees to agree in writing.

How we work

We begin with what you already know but have not assembled: win and loss reasons, sales calls, support tickets, the questions that keep coming up in demos, what review sites and analysts say. Then we go outside the building and talk to your customers, because the reason they bought is rarely the reason recorded in the CRM.

From there we write the argument and put it under pressure. We test it against your sales team, against the objections you lose to, and against the competitors who could claim the same thing. A position that anyone in your category could occupy is not a position.

What you get

A positioning statement and the reasoning behind it. A messaging framework covering the website, the first meeting, the pitch, and the renewal. Audience definitions with the concerns of each person who has to say yes. Brand architecture where there is a portfolio to make sense of. And, where it is useful, the naming.

Written so the next person to arrive can see why the decisions were made rather than guess.

Consulting that does not stop at the deck

A strategy is a hypothesis until something is built on it. We can stop at the recommendation if that is what you need, but the reason clients usually keep going is that we build what the strategy implies: the identity, the website, the product surfaces, and the content. The argument then has to survive contact with a real page and a real customer, which is the only test that counts.

When it is worth doing

Ahead of a rebrand, a new category, a funding round, or a merger. When two parts of the company describe the business differently and neither is wrong. When growth has slowed and nobody can say precisely what you are better at.